Business analytics is the helpful to make critical business decision in a simple way with the help of various operational and managerial data. Business analytics area are divided into many subgroups such as data collection, data organizing in a sequential manner, analyzing collected data and separate useful information from data sources to make correct decisions. To make critical business decision, data analyst help to extract required information from business data.
Business is operated in a broader way so, business analytics help to monitor business performance in every area such as finance, operation, marketing, human resource, dispatch, quality, planning, procurement, supply chain etc. To analyze the various data from operational processes business analytics, use statistical and quantitative tools to monitor performance based on trends and pattern of various data.
What is the primary objective of business analytics?
- To improve business performance with optimizing business processes with the help of various data analysis.
- Identify opportunity for improvement in business process.
Areas of Business Analytics
Data Aggregation: –
Data aggregation mainly focused to collect various data with the different processes and it is also called as data collection. To deeply understanding the data aggregation concept, knowledge of data types is very important. Data collection is carried out many ways as per mention in below.
- Manually data collection with paper and pen.
- Manually data collection in PC.
- Directly data collection from machine PLC to main server.
- Data Collection from various tools such as SAP, Oracle and others.
- Data collection from various surveys & feedback form or the interviews.
Data Mining
Data mining process focused on to searching readable graphical pattern from various data with the help various software and analyze the data pattern and get the useful information from the data pattern. Organization generally used data mining tools & software to understand customer behavior towards products and services, developing various marketing strategies and seasonal demand analysis based on data trends.
Sequential steps to work data mining.
- Data collection and loaded into cloud service.
- IT team and business analyst analyze the data and organize into required form.
- Collect the customer requirements from data.
- Present the relevant data to customer in an understandable form such as graphical.
Data Visualization: –
Data visualization is the internal tool of various software such as Microsoft excel to represent the data in the graphical format. Now a day’s many experts make own data visualization dashboard to monitoring the performance of various routine processes. With the help of data visualization tool expert easily take the decision for performance improvement.
Statistical Analysis: –
Statistical analysis is the technique to analyze the various data and identify the inside information about the data trends. Statistical analysis performs with the help of various formulas and graphical charts.
What are the types of business analytics?
Descriptive Analytics: –
Descriptive analytics focused to analyze past data of various business processes and try to understand past business performance with the data pattern. The main task of descriptive analytics is to compare past performance with current trend and identify opportunity for improvement.
Diagnostic Analytics: –
Diagnostic analytics analyze the various past data of business processes and identify the root cause for processes variations. They try to get more insight in past performance and identify loose fall that happened in past and focused on to that bad performance not happened in future with the current process improvement.
Predictive Analytics: –
Predictive analytics analyze the various data of current trend as well as past performance of business processes and predict the future trend of business growth. For predictive analytics statistical software, machine learning, artificial neural network and other software help to make future decision. Majority data analyst expert and machine learning expert help to analyze the future prediction based on data analysis.
Prescriptive Analytics: –
Prescriptive analytics help to provide information related to what are the action to be performed in the future based on various data analysis. Data driven future action really helpful for optimizing business process.
Text Analytics: –
Text analytics mostly used to analyze unstructured data such as customer feedback, supplier feedback, vendor behavior and many more.
Spatial Analytics: –
Spatial analytics helpful to analyzing geographical data. It helpful to identify accurate geographical locations for business requirement such as route identification for transportation & logistics, distribution network build up, real estate perspective and many more.
Difference between business analytics and business intelligence.
Before going to understand difference between business analytics and business intelligence just try to understand both terms are similar and interchangeably used to analyze the business performance. Review how both terms are differentiate each other as per below mention.
| Business Analytics | Business Intelligence |
| It mainly focused on to drive current and future business operations with the help of historical business data. | Business Intelligence mainly focused on to drive current businesses based on historical and current business data. |
| It mainly focused on to future prediction of business operations. | It mainly focused on to current business operations. |
| It help to organizational management for future visibility of business expansion or growth. | Business intelligence help to improving current business such as efficiency, productivity and optimize processes with data analysis. |
| Microsoft Excel, SAS Business Analytics, MicroStrategy, R and Python, Power BI, Sisense and Tableau are the popular software used in business analytics. | SAP, Microsoft Power BI, Goggle Data Studio, Oracle BI, and Dundas Data Visualization are the popular software used in business intelligence. |
Frequently Asked Questions of Business Analytics.
Is there Business Analytics co-relation with the operation management?
Yes, business analytics and operation management are directly co-relating with each other in fact, with the presence of business analytics operation management performance improve day by day and easily analyze the process variation with the continuous data capturing and analyzing. There are several pillars in operation management such as Inventory control, supply chain management, administration, quality control and delivery, in short business analytics very effective role play in all the areas and identify opportunity for improvements in each area.
Is the Business Analytics helpful to improve business performance?
Yes, business analytics is very much helpful to improve business performance. In fact, in large scale organization management separate the business analytics department and its main responsibility to analyze data from various processes and get the useful information from various data. Now a day’s in small scale business processes data analysis play a vital role but the many organization not believe in the generation of data and data analysis. To predicting business growth as well as optimizing business processes, data generation from various processes and data analysis is very much important and its also helpful for taking critical business decisions.
How KPI and KRA are integrated with Business Analytics?
Key performance indicators and Key result areas are very important measurable parameters to any business, operational or other processes. Now, the role of business analytics is to analyze data from various sources and transform to easily measurable form that key management person easily take the critical decision based on data. Business analytics is directly integrated with KPI and KRA to measure business performance with important indicators.
The common goal of KRA, KPI and business analytics is almost same to measure and monitor business performance and verify the variance from current & past business performance. KRA and KPI both helps to easily understand the process variations but the root cause identification purpose needs to analyze data in a more detail manner and now the business analytics play a vital role to analyze the process variations. Also, the only data analysis is not the sufficient but, brainstorming session plan, understand the ground reality and discussion with the various operational person to touch with the correct data variation reason.
What are the types of business analytics?
Business analytics can be categorized into 6 different types as per below.
1. Descriptive analytics
2. Diagnostic analytics
3. Predictive analytics
4. Prescriptive analytics
5. Text analytics
6. Spatial analytics
What are the areas of business analytics?
Business analytics areas can be divided into 4 major categories as per below.
1. Data aggregation
2. Data mining
3. Data visualization
4. Statistical analysis
What is the primary objective of business analytics?
To improve business performance with optimizing business processes with the help of various data analysis.
Identify opportunity for improvement in business process.
