Using Business Analytics for Better Decision-Making

britneychristine
3 min readOct 1, 2020

--

A great way to determine what influenced a company’s performance in the past and improve the outlook is by accessing its previous business data. Business analysis allows companies to identify challenges and have a greater understanding of how processes can be improved and achieve better results in terms of growth, business efficiency, KPI’s and risk management.

Business analytics firms today heavily bank on technological advancements to gather, record and categorise unprecedented amounts of data. Businesses can use this data to arrive at a business decision rather than relying and going by their gut feeling.

So how do business analytics can help your business outlook and performance? Let’s have a look.

Business analytics firms use technological tools and categorise data in three different units:

  • Descriptive — A summary of analytics, which is quite basic
  • Predictive — Here business analysts use statistical modelling, data mining and machine learning to verify the past and present data, and furnish it to users to understand how it can influence future decisions
  • Prescriptive — As the name suggests, this unit uses a wide array of plans to collect the data and show the outcome of each plan

How analytics can influence your decision-making?

Making the right decision at every step of business operation is critical for the growth of the company. Business analytics thus have a wider role to play in influencing the internal and external stature of the organization and can prove extremely beneficial for companies in several processes. Here’s how data analytics can influence your decision making:

1. Better customer experience

Data analytics can help business leaders interpret both employees and customers’ persona, allowing them to understand their approaches, interactions, and work with various departments to enhance these interactions.

For instance, a company can liaise its IT department with marketing teams to attain desired targets and audience outcomes. It will also help businesses to recognise how they can effectively manage the budgets based on customers’ response to marketing campaigns.

2. Boost performance

Data analytics can also help enhance the internal performance of your company. You can utilise it to maximise employee skills and time. You can get a deeper understanding of which areas of departments need improvisation and how reconfigured teams can boost productivity across the entire business spectrum. Besides, it also gives you evidence-based results about employee performance, which you can rely on when promoting employees.

3. Manage internal costs

Advanced analytics techniques can significantly help you cut down your internal costs, thereby helping you make better business decisions and achieve enhanced operations across the supply chain. For instance, letting your IT department run simulations on machinery and inventory can help configure the department’s budget and improve inventory management.

4. Access risk assessment and management

Business analytics can help you gain a greater insight into risk assessment and management, helping you make better decisions. Even if it’s a structured database like an existing database or unstructured one as in social media or blog posts, aligning your digital team with IT department can help you eliminate a more reactive risk management cycle.

Financial institutions can greatly benefit by combining their structural data such as client credit scores and unstructured data such as loyalty customer results to better configure their credit risk models.

So you see, business analytics have a wider application in every sphere of an organization. Instead of arriving at a decision based on assumptions, why not have a concrete, researched-based data at hand and formulate your crucial decisions. Embracing business analytics in businesses is the need of the hour and if you have technological tools and analysts at your disposal, there’s no reason why businesses shouldn’t make the most of them.

Since most businesses don’t have this skill set in-house or need to supplement portions with what their teams are capable of handling, hiring a business analysis company will make a major difference.

At TheAnalystAgency , we provide comprehensive business analysis support services and provide a much clearer overview of the specific challenges your company faces so that you could enhance your operations or improve your processes of technologies!

Sign up to discover human stories that deepen your understanding of the world.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

--

--

No responses yet

Write a response