What Is Business Analytics?

Business analytics is a set of practices, technologies and skills that helps organizations understand and improve their performance. These practices can include Predictive analytics, Prescriptive analytics, and data visualization. Ultimately, they can provide valuable insight and drive business planning. But what exactly is business analytics? In this article, we’ll explore the various forms of this discipline.

Predictive analytics

Predictive business analytics uses various techniques and tools to predict the future. These techniques include decision trees, regression, and neural networks. These tools are crucial to the exploitation of data. To learn more about these techniques, Emeritus offers online courses and partnerships with some of the top universities in the world.

Predictive business analytics provides actionable insights that can help businesses make better decisions. This approach can save time and money, and cut down on ongoing expenses, including wasted capital on marketing campaigns. But while predictive analytics can provide significant advantages, it is important to keep in mind that it requires significant data gathering. In the beginning, predictive analytics may cause a disruption in operations and require high upfront costs. Also, the data must be clean and accurate.

Predictive business analytics can help companies understand their customers’ buying habits and preferences. For example, the retailer Sephora analyzes each customer’s purchasing history to identify which products are most likely to increase sales. Harley-Davidson uses predictive analytics to identify high-value customers and highlight them in marketing campaigns. Predictive analytics is also being used in healthcare companies to better anticipate disease outbreaks and early warning signs.

Prescriptive analytics

Prescriptive business analytics can help you make informed decisions about the performance of your company’s processes. For example, a prescriptive analytics program can recommend a staffing level based on the volume of calls a call center handles at a specific time of day. It uses a multivariate model of data to make recommendations. It also requires a human to oversee the results.

Using prescriptive analytics, you can predict and manage risks by anticipating what will happen. Then, you can determine the best course of action based on that knowledge. As long as you have the right data and the right input assumptions, this approach is a great tool for your business.

Statistical analysis

Statistical analysis helps companies analyze data to make better decisions and save money. It also allows them to know what their customers are buying, how many of them they have, and what actions they are taking daily. Using statistics helps businesses avoid costly mistakes and find future opportunities to grow and develop. In addition to identifying trends, this type of analysis can identify the costs that are preventing your business from growing.

Statistical analysis can help companies find out where to make investments to grow. A business can use statistical analysis to analyze and predict revenue and sales. It can also be used to determine staffing needs. It can also help businesses make cash flow predictions.

Data visualization

Data visualization is a powerful tool for improving your business. It can help you identify problems and outliers. It can improve the decision-making process and increase efficiency. It can even help you identify which products are performing poorly. In other words, data visualization makes it easier to understand a data set and determine if there’s a need to make changes.

The key to success with data visualization is to understand your audience’s processing style and the size of the data that you’ll be working with. The growth of big data creates new challenges when it comes to data visualization. These data types are often high volumes and vary in velocities, making it difficult to process.

Costs

The costs of business analytics can vary greatly depending on the size of your organization. For small-to-medium sized companies, the costs can range from $10,000 to $100,000 per year. The actual amount will depend on the number of employees and the needs of your company. However, it is recommended that companies budget about two to six percent of their total budget to handle data analytics. Regardless of size, data analytics is a great way to gain valuable insights and make more informed business decisions.

Developing a business analytics program requires extensive data. A robust data repository will allow you to develop complex models and perform a variety of analysis on your data. Unlike traditional statistical software, this type of program is not locked in the IT department and can be implemented in the business by the leaders of your organization. However, it is important to note that the costs associated with business analytics can quickly add up when spread across multiple departments.