Business Analytics

How do you get to the right business decisions, improve employee

accountability, track performance of your products and services, learn how to

make these better and increase overall performance within your enterprise? Very

simple. Through an average day, your business is accumulating tons of data

within its data warehouses. Business analytics lets you derive various kinds of

reports that allow you to get the benefits outlined above, based on this data.

The key pre-requisite to proper BA (business analytics) is the data that has

been collected and stored, because if you haven't got the data, you cannot

analyze it. In this story, we will look at some of the key trends in BA.

What is it?



Take for example, analysis of the sales report for the purpose of finding out
the percentage growth in sales. Now that sounds trivial! If it were that

straight forward, why would organizations spend on such solutions? Moreover, why

would vendors spend to make their analytics products and solutions better? The

reason is that a simple analysis of annual sales report of an organization will

take it nowhere. The way business is done and the way things change in its

operating environment, requires an organization to know a lot more than that.

For example, how about knowing the growth in sales, region wise, product wise,

or even time period wise in quick time and accurately? Now even if that sounds

simple, consider the fact that your organization might have an ERP, a CRM and an

SCM from different vendors running on different platforms and saving information

in ways that are poles apart to say the least. What if you want to know

customers' acceptance or rejection for a product over a region or over time,

and that how does the organization go about the management of that product line?

We believe by now you would have understood that we are talking about

complicated information retrieval on the fly and with a great degree of

accuracy.

Business analytics in itself is not a simple and singular activity. Your

organization will definitely be running on pre-defined processes, and the need

for process analytics might arise from time to time. For tracking your own

customer base, their likes and dislikes, you will require execution of customer

analysis which if further refined could also be regarding behavioral patterns.

The analysis could also be 'targeted' i.e. towards the evaluation a

particular parameter that is affecting the business. To put things on a

different genre, your analysis could be of historical data i.e. 'backward

looking' or of how things might turn out in case of introduction of any change

in process or strategy, or even a product i.e. 'forward looking.'

Tools available



One can use both standalone BA software as well as tools that are a part of a
larger solution to achieve BA. Some years ago, BA used to be more often

available as a separate product that one needed to deploy and integrate with

existing software. Today, you will find bits of BA in your ERP, CRM, SCM, data

warehousing, data mining, spreadsheets, and even storage related products. You

will also find BA tools in applications that contain a variety of data or are

more commonly used (like your email software). Developer tools available from a

variety of sources allow businesses to develop (or get develop) custom

integrations that can pull in analyses from different but related BA tools and

present them on one convenient dashboard for the enterprise decision maker.

Tools that are available can be both generic to any kind of business as well

as specific to the particular vertical in which your business operates. For

instance, there are BA tools specific to the manufacturing industry. Although

one such tool may seem sufficient, one must also take into account what it will

help you analyze. For instance, would your chosen generic BA tool know about

problems and KPI (Key Performance Indicators) specific to the manufacturing

industry? Or if you are in the services sector, would the tool know to

differentiate between a 'product' and a 'service', which would have

different ramifications in different stages of analysis?

The scene for BA is hotting up and a variety of vendors are now getting their

hands into the pie. HP got into the act as we were going to press by announcing

the creation of a separate BI unit. It recently acquired Knightsbridge Solutions

that's a BI/warehousing/ integration vendor in the US and Western Europe. HP's

new BI unit is expected to leverage this acquired expertise to perform 'business

information optimization'. Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 has Analytics

Services built into it as a module to help with analyzing data stored on its

databases in a variety of graphical web-based reports. Oracle's BI Suite

integrates it's 'Answers' product that lets you create ad-hoc queries and

reports. These reports are used by their other products like 'Delivers'

(that does workflow monitoring) to present information as e-mail or through

mobile devices. Finally interactive dashboards present the data in a single

customizable format to the decision maker. Teradata, a unit of NCR, has

something called the 'Value Analyzer' that aims to help improve your

profitability. This product has a behavior based view of your customers'

value, including upto date as well as projected value. This includes cost of

goods sold to them, risks associated with that customer and expenses/revenue

associated with him.

Who's in the game?



Well you can broadly classify vendors into two categories. The first comprises
those that provide complete end-to-end solutions that we have already talked

about. These are vendors that have their own platforms and products for

analytics and business intelligence alike. The second are solution providers

that implement them for their clients using the available set of platforms or

products. Well, as it is a diverse arena, it is not just either of them but both

that are in the thick of things. For example, Microsoft has integrated analytics

into SQL server 2007, named under package Analytics Services. As for the tools

arena, we have Business Objects with their line of products for analytics.

Similarly, solution providers also have implemented analytics projects. Talking

about clients, as organizations realize their needs of getting knowledge out of

information quickly and accurately, more and more have either adopted such

solutions or are planning to go for them. Currently, the banking sector is

already brimming with analytics and business intelligence, and so are

enterprises with huge repositories of data such as manufacturers, etc. In SMBs,

there are working projects, projects under implementation, those that use

warehouses to integrate data to those that use Excel tools for analytics.

In conclusion



It's not just the size of your organization that you should look upon while
going for analytics solutions. The fact is that it is better to realize what way

you can best utilize the information that is so important for your business.

There are plenty of options available in the arena for you to choose. So go

ahead and grab an analytical solution of your choice for enhancing the

efficiency of your business.