Tools for Successful Industry-wise Data Visualization
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. — Benjamin Franklin
The investment made today always has a question of what returns it fetches in the future. The term “Return on Investment” is well-known amongst every investor and young entrepreneur alike. It is essential to understand which competitive industries align with your concept of business. To understand the concept of returns and identify the key drivers, one must also determine the parameters that attract the target audience.
An industry-wise analysis facilitates critical insight into what your competitors offer. For example, demand-supply statistics, competition within the industry, competition of the industry with other synchronously emerging parallel sectors, future growth prospects of the sector considering scientific progression, industrial credit system, and the external factors in the industry are some of the parameters that need to be considered.
The first step towards a detailed industry-wise analysis is to gather the data sets that match your business goals in terms of target audience, objectives, competitive brands sales data, marketing expenses, and ROI.
There are various data sources through which you can obtain different data sets. The data sets help define a problem statement for a group of audiences and allow businesses to develop missing services or competitive products for that specific set of audiences. Links to get some suitable data repositories are listed below:
- Open Government Data Platform (ODG) India — The data tables obtained from the Government data platform specify data points of social consumption in health and education. Users can download the data-sets obtained from the surveys conducted on differently-abled, drinking water, sanitization, hygiene, and housing conditions based on geographic diversity. Also, users have access to vital industrial data from the website such as foreign direct investment (FDI) in agriculture and equity in machinery.
- Kaggle Sample datasets — There is a vast collection of various genres of data sets available on Kaggle. Kaggle also organizes competitions to win real money if you have a top-ranking visual model of your business.
- Datarade — Datarade is a reliable resource platform for downloading marketing data sets that contain audience-related stats i.e consumer type, demographic stats, social media audience stats, psychographics of the consumers, consumer purchase, and consumer financial data.
- Google Cloud Platform — Datasets available on Google are an excellent case study reference for new businesses.
Let’s discuss a few tools that drive business intelligence and can help us get the desired outcome.
Board International
The board tool supports worldwide leading organizations to make better business decisions through a blended analysis, simulation, and planning approach. The platform is toolkit-based, offering a deep level of customization.
The users can analyze historical data, share reports, and simulate the effects of different strategies on micro/macro-environmental changes. Based on desired output, the business can then plan their upcoming activities and control the process using the “go with comprehensive workflow management” command.
The key steps to solve decision-making challenges using this tool are as follows:
- The users need to connect their data source and select a file to analyze or compare. The brand tool will automatically identify codes, measures, descriptions, dimensions, and hierarchies and display them in an Excel-like environment.
Users can manipulate the Excel data for desired results. The best practice is to blend more data sets to derive accurate results and replicate the real-world scenario. - The Board offers a comprehensive dashboard that facilitates simple visualizations and remarkably advanced analyses. All you need to do is select the objects you need for visualization from the top menu bar, populate the visualization window by dragging data sets and measures, configure it, and run your analysis.
Try to experiment and be as creative as possible with the dashboard. Any single element — from charts to KPIs, from maps to single rows of a table — is all drillable, and the dashboard is entirely interactive. - Define your business rules which can turn your point analysis into sophisticated performance management applications. For example, users can work on objects, data, and workflow to model typical business processes, such as multi-dimensional data entry, calculation, and allocation.
- Run other third-party applications to verify the desired outcomes instantly and easily customize any application while building it.
Board tool is a non-coding platform, and great customization makes it perfect for critical industrial analysis. The tool’s customization allows everyone to be in sync by integrating department-based applications with enterprise-wide data and processes.
Tableau
Tableau is a cloud-based visualization software that connects all of your data with integrated artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. The tool also helps with governance and data management, and visual storytelling focused on business intelligence. Tableau provides infinite data exploration without disrupting the flow of analysis.
Users can master the Tableau software in five different roles, which are explained as follows:
- Creator: The creator imports the data set and uses Tableau Prep to connect, correct, or shape the data, then output it to Tableau Desktop for analysis. The flexile visual experience of Tableau Prep gives you a detailed understanding of your data. It makes everyday complex tasks like joins, unions, pivots, and aggregations visual and quite straightforward.
- Editor: The editor’s role is to browse, edit, and generate new data visualizations using Tableau Server or Tableau Online.
- Viewer: A view acts as a spectator and browses and communicates with data visualizations published to the Tableau Server or Tableau Online site.
- Admin: An admin plays two roles; one of them is setting up the site, adding users, setting permissions for tableau online, and the second one is installing and configuring the Tableau Server on Windows or Mac machines.
Tableau is a perfect solution for great visualization derived from connecting multiple data sources. The tool has excellent community forums for quick tips and tricks. Tableau is mobile-friendly, so you can use it even while you are traveling. It is perfect for large organizations as the software is expensive and indeed not for SMEs or startups.
Microsoft Power BI
Power BI is another tool that helps you gain deeper data insight by connecting and visualizing your data sets. The software is adaptable for self-service and enterprise business intelligence (BI). Users receive quick, AI-driven answers to their business questions in conversational language.
The process of gaining perfect visualization is through data modeling. The data modeling feature connects multiple data sources in the Power BI tool using a relationship between various data points forming structures.
Steps to accomplish perfect visualization are as follows:
- The primary step is to download and install Power BI from the Power BI homepage.
- The critical step is to import a data set from the data source you wish to visualize.
- Power BI will analyze the imported data and categorize the data points based on their nature in the Navigator Window. The tool offers an option to format the data before visualizing it using the “Transform Data” command.
- The visualization dashboards can be created using the visualization elements within the Visualizations tab on the right side of the panel such as Bar, Pie, or Donut charts.
The positives for Power BI would be its affordability as the desktop license is free and direct Excel integration as it is a part of the Microsoft ecosystem. This tool is perfectly apt for the SME and startup industries.
Power BI also offers versatile support towards various data file extensions and customized visualization tools, including KPIs, R script visuals, maps, charts, and graphs. The major drawback with the tool is that it is cumbersome and requires hardware with more processing capabilities, and the level of expertise needed is very high for using tools like Gateways, Power BI Report Server, and Power BI Services.
The other outstanding and popular visualization tools are Oracle Analytics Cloud and SAS Visual Analytics. These tools facilitate users to visualize their datasets accurately, demonstrating fundamental driving forces which influence their major business decisions.
The visualization data enables stakeholders to identify problems and patterns, helping them immediately improve response time. Making quicker decisions is vital for decision-makers in government and fast-paced industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and retail. Taking extended time to make critical decisions runs organizations’ risk of failing out on an opportunity, falling behind competitors, or having an insignificant problem grow exponentially worse.
To conclude, data visualization is not a one-time process and needs to be iterated multiple times to take ongoing critical decisions during the product life-cycle and audience journey management. Data visualization helps tell narratives by curating data into a form that is easier to comprehend while simultaneously focusing on trends and outliers. A good visualization tells a story, filtering the essential data by removing the noise from data.
