HOW DATA ANALYTICS IS RESHAPING BUSINESS TODAY

Your most critical and irreplaceable resource is your business data and every day, with every customer, internal and partner interaction you accumulate more. But this vital asset generates little value when it’s sitting dormant and inaccessible in antiquated data repositories

Why? Because siloed information can be difficult to access in a timely fashion, and raw, disorganized data contains items that are incorrect, incomplete, duplicated or otherwise inaccurate – in other words, not actionable. However, leading edge data analytics solutions enable businesses to break those walls, remove blind spots and integrate their fragmented data, transforming it into near-real-time actionable intelligence.

Every organization needs timely, accurate data to support decision-making regarding everything from human resource and customer relationship management to finance, marketing and sales, production, supply chain and more. Being able to access up-to-date information about all these functions allows an organization to gain a 360-degree view of their business, helping them make data-driven, profitable decisions. And with today’s post-COVID, turn-on-a-dime business models, top data analytics platforms deliver critical insights into current and future trends.

In fact, the recent uneven performance of many companies worldwide is partly rooted in their inability to foresee coming trends and respond effectively. These days the biggest differentiator between top-earning and underperforming businesses is their agility in adapting to the changing landscape, a capability largely governed by the quality of their data. This is why organizations worldwide are embracing data analytics as their most effective tool to detect and respond to challenges and make the necessary adjustments to remain competitive.

According to a report by Fortune Business Insights, the global big data analytics market is projected to grow from $271.83 billion in 2022 to $655.53 billion by 2029. This tells us that increasingly businesses themselves are recognizing that data analytics is the key to gaining a vital competitive advantage in volatile times. Insight-driven organizations are likely to maintain stability and adapt faster to adverse conditions.

While the wide range of online communications channels has made it easier for businesses to connect with potential buyers, it has also caused a mixed bag of online shoppers looking for businesses that fit their current needs. According to a survey published on Smart Insights, as of July 2022, 59% of the world's population relies on social media, with average daily usage at 2.5 hours. For businesses, this willingly captive audience can be a vast font of information, guiding their marketing and branding efforts and ultimately allowing businesses to win more customers and drive revenue.

Since lead conversion is the biggest win for any business, nurturing customers through their journey is the ultimate goal. The hitch? This huge volume of in-rushing data is too complex and fragmented to provide a single point of truth. Data analytics can help businesses sort through this ocean of information on customer behavior and buying patterns, letting them understand their potential customer’s persona and preferences so they can strategically position products and services to resonate with their target audience. The efforts a business puts into each potential buyer’s experience are critical to its overall success and top-level analytics can deliver precision insights that drive sales conversion rates.

In today’s competitive landscape, the success of a business is highly contingent on time to market—the interval between a product’s conception and development and its release for sale. The faster a business launches a better product onto the market, the higher their chance of winning against the competition. But for a product to offer a meaningful solution to consumer needs, a company has to have its finger on the pulse of target buyers. Data analytics that gives you verifiable insights into what your customers are looking for can make it happen.

Businesses spend substantial money on new product development, doing their utmost to align offerings to the needs of their target buyers. However, this is a drawn-out process that requires extensive insights into buying trends as well as specific issues customers are facing. In other words, it requires a unified data analytics solution that can deliver in-depth research into design, technical and functional qualities that will make a new product desirable to the widest possible range of potential customers.

When you tie your entire new product development process, from research to product ideation, development, marketing and sales directly to your data analytics, it dramatically compresses development cycles, speeds new product roll-out and maximizes outreach. An agile product development process, supported by leading-edge data analytics, is one of the quickest ways to become an innovation leader, leading to greater brand awareness and driving higher sales, greater market share and increased overall growth.

Manufacturing is one of the most strategic components of the overall value chain process, which aims to reduce production time, increase throughput and control costs. It unites all key phases of production from design to prototyping and quality assurance and deploys tools and practices to reduce overall spend.

The ultimate goal: to create efficient manufacturing functions that lower production costs and increase response time at every step of the process. Integrating data analytics throughout your manufacturing process cuts costs associated with production overheads, including fuel, energy consumption and labor, and accelerates output to respond to market demands. It also helps identify automation opportunities to improve efficiency for repetitive tasks relying on manual labor.

Cost overruns are the biggest worry for both large and small businesses, yet too often effective financial planning is hampered by a lack of visibility into future market forces. For example, a manufacturing company may buy raw materials during peak season when prices are high, then encounter cost overruns once production begins. Or an apparel business may drive up supply chain costs if it fails to schedule storage and move inventory efficiently.

But with data analytics in place, the manufacturer would have near-real-time market information that allows them to time purchases of raw materials to take advantage of the lowest prices. Likewise, the apparel business can leverage analytics to optimize their supply chain cycle to avoid overhead incurred by keeping inventory in its warehouse longer than necessary. Thus, by providing comprehensive near-real-time data on market behavior, precision data analytics tools arm businesses with a 360-degree view of cost management, letting them perform in-depth analyses, exert better control on spending and optimize forecasting.

A multitude of events over the past few years have disrupted businesses worldwide, and changing operating models and buying behaviors have introduced an array of additional challenges. But by allowing organizations to adapt in near-real-time to meet these challenges, next generation data analytics platforms offer unprecedented options to anticipate change, optimize processes and future-proof business operations.

mLogica’s best-in-class CAP*M hyperscale big data platform can intake petabytes of structured, unstructured and semi-structured business data, integrating disparate data repositories for comprehensive, near-real-time organizational reporting and analysis. Read more