13 Analytics & Business Intelligence

Examples Illustrating the Value of BI

Digital data, by its very nature, paints a clear, concise, and

panoramic picture of a number of vital areas of business
performance, offering a window of insight that often leads to
creating an enhanced business intelligence strategy and,
ultimately, an ongoing commercial success.

Business intelligence steps up into this process by creating a

comprehensive perspective of data, enabling teams to generate
actionable insights on their own.

With the introduction of online BI, companies today have the

chance to create additional value, and, ultimately, profit.

At its core, business intelligence (BI) encompasses the strategies

and technologies used by companies for the detailed online
data analysis of key business-based information.
 BI technologies offer historical, current, and predictive insights
into various aspects of business operations, thus helping a
company to make informed decisions on activities centered
around finances, marketing, sales, competitor research, social
outreach, internal processes and more.

Business intelligence is vital in our digitally-driven world as it

essentially gives you an additional sense: a commercial vision
that can help you see and process far more than the
information that presents itself on the surface.

And there are business intelligence examples and insights out

there that demonstrate that every notion.

To put the power of business intelligence into perspective, here

are 4 key insights you should know:

 Businesses using analytics are five times more likely to make

better, quicker decisions, according to an article published on
BetterBuys.

 By 2025, the global BI and analytics market is expected to soar

to a worth of $147.19 billion, growing at a CAGR of 26.98%
from 2016.

 Businesses will create and manage 60% of the world’s data by

2025.

 85% of business leaders believe that big data will change the
way they do business, significantly, especially in the
personalization potential of intelligence.
It’s clear that BI and the tools that facilitate better business
intelligence are vital to the future of any company competing in
the digital arena, regardless of industry or sector.

BA and BI Live examples

1) Improving The Decision-Making Process
One of the primary benefits of BI is the ability to make better
and more valuable decisions, and this business intelligence
example is based on that very idea.

In the first of our business analytics examples, the CEO and

founder of a budding fintech company was presented with the
challenge of changing his business’s internal culture with a
view to making all business data more accessible across the
board.

To avoid the IT department having sole control over the data,

and thereby preventing other departments from working
collaboratively and making informed decisions that benefit the
business,

the company’s CEO deployed a dashboard reporting

software for an automated data reporting process.

As a direct result of this decision, not only is the company’s

data now decentralized and digestible, improving the decision-
making process across the board, but it has also saved 40
valuable hours per week on report preparation. This is one of
our business insights examples that don’t stop here.

Speaking on this BI triumph, the fintech CEO said, “All departments

now can access their own real-time dashboards, no matter if they are
in the office or at a meeting. All decision-makers have quick, easy
access to ad-hoc analysis and reports, even on their tablets.”
2) Uncovering Fresh Business Insights
The second of our business analytics examples is focused on
discovering new business insights that can ultimately help
streamline commercial processes, thereby improving
productivity and boosting the bottom line.

A forward-thinking online food ordering business wanted to

gain a better insight into the life cycles of its customers while
gaining the ability to optimize sales reports and marketing
campaigns in a time-efficient, cost-saving, and autonomous
way.

By gaining self-service access to real-time analytical

information the company was able to streamline its
marketing and sales activities, make better, swifter decisions
based on real-time information and uncover fresh insights
that have served to improve its level of customer experience,
resulting in increased brand loyalty.
The use of a real-time dashboard has empowered the
budding online food giant to monitor all significant business
operations through customized KPIs.

Moreover, the new business analytics platform has made the

business more able to rise to challenges as they unfold in
days, rather than weeks or even months later. With the help
of sales graphs and charts, the data was easily interacted
with, and presented on a single screen.

This is one of our examples of business analytics that

demonstrates how quickly the power of business intelligence
affects the decision-making processes and creates a backbone
for sustainable growth.
3) Boosting Productivity
Today’s consumers crave ratings, opinions, and reviews from
their peers to help them make decisions, particularly when it
comes to travel.

That said, a travel-based rating business should be able to

deliver an exemplary level of customer experience and
support to its users.

In the third of our business intelligence examples, a hotel

rating company based in Berlin turned to business
intelligence analytics software as its data was fragmented,
diluting its impact across the company, impairing its
productivity and service levels as a result.

By rolling out a SaaS-based analytics solution that requires

minimal IT intervention and making it accessible across the
organization, the travel company was able to consolidate its
key data in one accessible space.

When it comes to big data examples in real life, this travel

business made a wise BI-based move that resulted in
improved internal efficiency, better interdepartmental
cohesion, and the new level of insight has also enhanced the
company’s level of customer support beyond the CEO’s
wildest expectations.
4) Increasing Sales
Number 4 of our inspiring BI examples demonstrate that by
using big data analytics to your advantage, you can increase
your sales – which is one of the primary aims for all business
worldwide.

By taking advantage of well-established sales KPIs, each

business can improve its bottom line.

Let’s see this through one of our top examples of companies

using business intelligence.

A rising online retail player was suffering from an

inconsistent and somewhat erratic sales performance for
some time and was unable to evolve its strategy despite a
host of efforts.

After turning to BI methodologies and incorporating a sales

dashboard to solve this ongoing issue, it became apparent,
almost immediately, that force rather than data drove the
company’s sales strategy.

By realigning its strategy and drilling down into the data

available at its fingertips, the company’s sales grew by 24%
while rep attrition fell by 90%.

A better organized target-setting process, as well as

streamlined sales strategies driven by data, has ensured that
the company not only continues to scale, but its sales team
continues to surpass its targets.
5) Improving Financial Efficiency
Without a doubt, your financial department is one of
the beating hearts of your organization because,
without steady cash flow and the capital to invest back
into the business, the entire operation would grind to
halt.

That said, the fifth of our business analytics examples

focuses on evolving a company’s business intelligence
to identify potential cash flow issues and improve
financial efficiency.
In this scenario, a disease diagnostics brand turned to
an online reporting software and business intelligence
methodologies as, despite a period of rapid growth,
the company’s percentage collections were low, and
accounts receivables, as well as claim denials, had
reached a record high.

To tackle this potentially devastating issue, the

company implemented an intuitive financial reporting
system that allowed them to drill down into a wealth
of relevant account-based metrics but also utilizing a
wealth of financial graphs that helped them see data
in a visual and straightforward way.

As a result of this savvy BI initiative, and the most

financially-driven of our examples of business
intelligence, the business diagnostics was able to,
well, diagnose the issues by leveraging the power
of financial reports, uncovering the source of the claim
denials, and recovering millions of dollars’ worth of
claims in the process.
6) Streaming Internal Processes
A rapidly growing US-based healthcare company suffering
from a raft of disjointed internal processes and commercial
inefficiencies sought the power of BI in the sixth of our
analytics examples.

Due to a lack of cross-departmental compatibility arisen out

of poor data handling, collection, and analytics processes, the
business was unable to use this wealth of digital insight to its
advantage.

However, by working with a BI partner to develop and

deploy a unified business intelligence system that integrates
multiple data sources into one single platform, the healthcare
company was able to analyze their data in on an efficient,
valuable and accessible format, empowering it to make
increasingly smart decision to benefit the business.

This is one of our business insights examples that shows us

how healthcare companies can perform on a much higher
level.

Armed with the tools required to perform their jobs better,

departments including finance, billing, marketing, and sales
began to work more productively, evolving internal
processes, and boosting cross-departmental collaboration.

This scenario is perhaps one of the most valuable of our

business analytics examples as it serves to showcase how big
data in healthcare and business intelligence can help foster a
culture of continual evolution, which is an invaluable asset in
today’s fast-paced digital world.
7) Saving Marketing Dollars
One of our industry BI solutions examples focuses solely on the
marketing department of a company.

A US-based e-commerce company suffered from low

conversion rates, despite the fact their campaigns were
monitored on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis with the help
of traditional spreadsheets.

The team was disparate across 19 US cities, and their

communication was oftentimes slow.

By the time the campaign manager analyzed the campaign

data, another campaign already needed to be launched. This
blind approach to their promotional activities cost them days
and weeks of proper planning, analyses, and reporting process.

Losing time in marketing is a significant issue that costs dollars,

and, ultimately, conversions.

A centralized BI solution saved the team 4 working days per

week by automating the reporting processes, alarming the
designated campaign manager when an anomaly in the
campaign occurred, and predicting future campaign results.

They utilized a similar marketing dashboard such as this one:

This example of business intelligence shows the top 3
campaigns by spent budget, the total number of impressions,
clicks, acquisitions, and the CPA by a campaign for the last 12
weeks.

The whole team had this dashboard automatically delivered

and updated in their inbox each week – insights were made
fast, campaigns were planned better, and campaign managers
across the US had the same data at the same time so their
communication and cohesion also improved.
8) Reducing IT Involvement
A financial company was having difficulties in their
analytical processes involving the IT department. Their daily
analytical and ad hoc reports were often times late, and
employees didn’t have a proper insight into the massive
amounts of data they were collecting.

The IT department was simply overburdened with requests

from each department of the company, and when you add the
additional tasks they needed to handle, they were
overpowered with a shortage of time and efficiency.

The company wanted to decentralize the decision-making

process, and grant business users across the company the
possibility to extract, administer, and derive insights while
creating their own reports, without the need to wait for the IT
department for hours, even days. Since they needed to
combine multiple data sources, internal and external, a
business intelligence solution was a logical step forward for
implementing into their operational and strategic
management.

The company quickly saw an improvement of their reporting

and analytical processes, not only via automated standard
reports but also in ad hoc analysis, where they only needed to
utilize a drag-and-drop interface to generate immediately
actionable insights. The IT department could also resort to
the database reporting tool since business intelligence
provides beginner and advanced features for business users
across industries and departments.

This is one of the business analytics examples that show how

to unburden staff and create a working culture that saves
time and increases productivity.
9) Connecting Departments
Another real-world business analytics example centers around
a fashion label based in Washington, D.C. with multiple stores
across the city.

Their challenges arose when they needed to combine sales and

marketing data in real-time, optimize their promotional
activities to deliver the best possible results, and create a
comprehensive overview of the customer lifecycle.

That meant that a vast amount of data and KPIs needed to be

managed and successfully analyzed to get the best possible
results.

They decided to implement business intelligence into their

operations to be able to monitor real-time data, ensure
employees have access to marketing and sales analytics and use
a dashboard builder to visualize all their business information.

It not only improved customer loyalty (we will talk about this
in another example of business intelligence), but by connecting
various datasets from different departments, the company
managed to utilize these business intelligence KPI tools for
various purposes such as aligning promotional activities with
the goal of closing more sales deals.

Ultimately, the sales department was better informed about

marketing activities, and the marketing department could
better plan their promotions to fit the overall customer
lifecycle.
10) Increasing Employee Performance
We continue with examples of companies using business
intelligence by mentioning an HR department of a US-based
company that was experiencing issues when employees
started to increase their overtime hours, the productivity
decreased, but the number of sick days steadily grew.

This was an unusual situation in HR since it showed them

that there are issues with the workforce, but they couldn’t
afford the time to speak with each employee, it would have
taken them weeks of time, even months.

The manager decided to take advantage of HR analytics

software and utilize business intelligence for their
department.

By analyzing workforce behavior and performance, the

department had a better overview of the issues that needed to
be solved.

The most prominent HR KPIs that were looked upon are the
overall labor effectiveness, overtime hours, absenteeism rate,
and the training costs to see if new hires would make sense.

After looking at the data on interactive visualizations that

gathered historical and present information of the whole
department, the manager could clearly conclude that the
department was understaffed, chronically tired, and the
company needs new hires or the sick days will increase
exponentially, thus creating substantial business issues in the
long run.

This is one of our operational business intelligence examples

that showed us how workforce management can be
streamlined and upscaled so that the whole company doesn’t
deteriorate because the staff simply needs more help.

They used an HR dashboard similar to this example below:

This enabled them to advance their employee productivity and

the overall performance since the analytics process empowered
the manager to make a better-informed decision and create
regular HR reports that provide accurate data. And it didn’t
take weeks or months to do it, visualizations were generated
with a few clicks.

Now we will focus on examples of business analytics that

improved a manufacturing business located in France.

11) Enhancing Manufacturing Processes

A plethora of data is managed in the manufacturing

industry, and when you add the increased use of
robotics and artificial intelligence, this industry is one of
the pioneers when it comes to utilizing business
intelligence.
The issues this particular German-based company was
facing were related to streamlining their production
process since they started to experience more problems
with their equipment so the production volume
decreased, and business concerns started to arise.

By having a birds-eye view of all the manufacturing

analytics needed to successfully operate the production
process, the company managed to make the most out of
intelligent data alerts that enabled the production
workers to be immediately alarmed when an anomaly
would occur.

This ensured that no machinery is out of order any more

as their repairs and management could go under
immediate inspection, even before the actual breakdown
occurred, the production process stopped, and
enormous amounts of revenue lost.

This is one of our real-world business analytics

examples that puts a spotlight on artificial intelligence,
and how it improves the maintenance of production
facilities that need the lowest production downtime
possible, one of the most important manufacturing KPIs,
alongside with the production volume and costs.

Now we will take a look at our next business

intelligence solutions examples focused on retail and a
web-based electronics supplier.
12) Improving Customer Loyalty
In number 12 of our business analytics examples, a
clothing retailer in the early stages of its rising success
was struggling to scale its business further.

After a year of impressive growth, the business saw its

profits and customer acquisition levels plateau while
seeing a rise in customer churn.

The company was able to maintain its momentum so it

decided external help was needed for continued success.
By opting for a retail dashboard customized to display a
host of invaluable demographic data about its existing
users and target audience and with retail KPIs focused
on increasing customer value and new customer
acquisition, the company began to grow its audience
once again.

The business was able to identify its strengths and

weaknesses, spot emerging trends, and segment its
audience accurately to ensure it offered the right
personalized deals or offers to the right set of
consumers, resulting in significant growth in its
customer base and increased brand loyalty.

13) Optimizing Inventory

The thirteenth and final of our operational business
intelligence examples, or business analytics examples, is
centered on stock or inventory optimization.

Around 46% of SMBs either don’t track their inventory

or use a laborious manual method to do so, costing time,
money, and a host of other valuable resources.

A tight-knit web-based electronics supplier that deals

with a large warehouse of ever-changing stock began to
feel the effects of a poor inventory management process
when it began to lose track of high-value items and
ensure an increasing number of in-house damages.

Before the situation spiraled out of control, the company

adopted a decision support system (DSS) so it could use
all of its inventory-based data to make informed choices
regarding the way it stored, quantified, and managed its
stock on a sustainable basis.

This exhaustive and incredibly smart analysis of

historical data in addition to stock-taking metrics for
warehouse product not only helped the business to keep
track of its various items, but it also prevented damages
and ensured all of its popular products remained
stocked at all times.

We live in an age rich in data, and those that use it

wisely today will reap endless rewards tomorrow, and
beyond.

These examples of business analytics prove that BI is no

longer a process used solely by specific industries, but
its implementation is welcomed and successfully
employed by managers, employees, average business
users, and IT specialists who want to work with a
seamless SQL report builder and build their analysis
with this popular language.

We hope that these BI examples have inspired you to

improve your organization’s processes and for further
reading, explore these 10 essential data visualization
techniques.
 Business analytics (BA)

Business analytics (BA) is the systematic practice of `methodical

exploration of an organization's data, with an emphasis on statistical
analysis.

Business analytics is used by companies committed to data-driven

decision-making.

BA is used to gain insights that inform business decisions and can be used
to automate and optimize business processes.

Data-driven companies treat their data as a corporate asset and leverage it

for a competitive advantage.

Successful business analytics depends on data quality, skilled analysts who

understand the technologies and the business, and an organizational
commitment to data-driven decision-making.

BA, business analytics is the combination of skills, technologies,

applications and processes used by organizations to gain insight in to their
business based on data and statistics to drive business planning.

Business analytics is used to evaluate organization-wide operations, and

can be implemented in any department from sales to product development
to customer service.

Business analytics solutions typically use use data, statistical and

quantitative analysis and fact-based data to measure past performance to
guide an organization's business planning.
A Definition of Business Analytics

Business Analytics is “the study of data through statistical and operations

analysis, the formation of predictive models, application of optimization
techniques, and the communication of these results to customers, business
partners, and college executives.”

Business Analytics requires quantitative methods and evidence-based data

for business modeling and decision making; as such, Business Analytics
requires the use of Big Data.

Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful

patterns in data and applying those patterns towards effective decision
making.

In other words, analytics can be understood as the connective tissue

between data and effective decision making, within an organization.
Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies
on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer
programming and operations research to quantify performance.

Organizations may apply analytics to business data to describe, predict,

and improve business performance. Specifically, areas within analytics
include

predictive analytics,

prescriptive analytics,

enterprise decision management,

descriptive analytics,

cognitive analytics,
Big Data Analytics,

retail analytics,

supply chain analytics,

store assortment and

stock-keeping unit optimization,

marketing optimization and marketing mix modeling,

web analytics,

call analytics,

speech analytics,

sales force sizing and optimization,

price and promotion modeling,

predictive science,

credit risk analysis, and fraud analytics.

Since analytics can require extensive computation (see big data), the
algorithms and software used for analytics harness the most current
methods in computer science, statistics, and mathematics.[1]

Analysis is focused on understanding the past; what happened. Analytics

focuses on why it happened and what will happen next.[2]
Data analytics is a multidisciplinary field. There is extensive use of computer
skills, mathematics and statistics, the use of descriptive techniques and
predictive models to gain valuable knowledge from data.[citation needed].

The insights from data are used to recommend action or to guide decision
making rooted in business context. Thus, analytics is not so much
concerned with individual analyses or analysis steps, but with the
entire methodology[according to whom?].

There is a pronounced tendency to use the term analytics in business

settings e.g. text analytics vs. the more generic text mining to emphasize this
broader perspective.[citation needed]

There is an increasing use of the term advanced analytics,[citation

needed] typically used to describe the technical aspects of analytics,
especially in the emerging fields such as the use of machine
learning techniques like neural networks, Decision Tree, Logistic Regression,
linear to multiple regression analysis,

Classification to do predictive modeling. It also includes Unsupervised

Machine learning techniques like cluster analysis, Principal Component
Analysis, segmentation profile analysis and association analysis.

Benefits of Data-Driven Decision Making with Business Analytics

Companies use Business Analytics (BA) to make data-driven decisions.

The insight gained by BA enables these companies to automate and
optimize their business processes. In fact, data-driven companies that
utilize Business Analytics achieve a competitive advantage because they
are able to use the insights to:

Conduct data mining (explore data to find new patterns and relationships)
Complete statistical analysis and quantitative analysis to explain why
certain results occur

Test previous decisions using A/B testing and multivariate testing

Make use of predictive modeling and predictive analytics to forecast future

results

Business Analytics also provides support for companies in the process of

making proactive tactical decisions, and BA makes it possible for those
companies to automate decision making in order to support real-time
responses.
Stages/Types of data analytics

There are 4 types of analytics. Here, we start with the simplest one and go
down to more sophisticated. As it happens, the more complex an analysis
is, the more value it brings.
D2P2

Descriptive analytics

Descriptive analytics answers the question of what happened. For instance,

a healthcare provider will learn how many patients were hospitalized last
month; a retailer – the average weekly sales volume; a manufacturer – a
rate of the products returned for a past month, etc. Let us also bring an
example from our practice: a manufacturer was able to decide on focus
product categories based on the analysis of revenue, monthly revenue per
product group, income by product group, total quality of metal parts
produced per month.
Descriptive analytics juggles raw data from multiple data sources to give
valuable insights into the past. However, these findings simply signal that
something is wrong or right, without explaining why. For this reason, highly
data-driven companies do not content themselves with descriptive analytics
only and prefer combining it with other types of data analytics.

Diagnostic analytics

At this stage, historical data can be measured against other data to answer
the question of why something happened. Thanks to diagnostic analytics,
there is a possibility to drill down, to find out dependencies and to identify
patterns. Companies go for diagnostic analytics, as it gives in-depth
insights into a particular problem. At the same time, a company should
have detailed information at their disposal, otherwise data collection may
turn out to be individual for every issue and time-consuming.

Let’s take another look at the examples from different industries: a

healthcare provider compares patients’ response to a promotional
campaign in different regions; a retailer drills the sales down to
subcategories. Another flashback to our BI projects: in the healthcare
industry, customer segmentation coupled with several filters applied (like
diagnoses and prescribed medications) allowed measuring the risk of
hospitalization.

Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics tells what is likely to happen. It uses the findings of

descriptive and diagnostic analytics to detect tendencies, clusters and
exceptions, and to predict future trends, which makes it a valuable tool for
forecasting. Despite numerous advantages that predictive analytics brings,
it is essential to understand that forecasting is just an estimate, the
accuracy of which highly depends on data quality and stability of the
situation, so it requires a careful treatment and continuous optimization.
Thanks to predictive analytics and the proactive approach it enables, a
telecom company, for instance, can identify the subscribers who are most
likely to reduce their spend, and trigger targeted marketing activities to
remediate; a management team can weigh the risks of investing in their
company’s expansion based on cash flow analysis and forecasting. One of
our case studies describes how advanced data analytics allowed a leading
FMCG company to predict what they could expect after changing brand
positioning.

Prescriptive analytics

The purpose of prescriptive analytics is to literally prescribe what action to

take to eliminate a future problem or take full advantage of a promising
trend. An example of prescriptive analytics from our project portfolio: a
multinational company was able to identify opportunities for repeat
purchases based on customer analytics and sales history.

This state-of-the-art type of data analytics requires not only historical data,
but also external information due to the nature of statistical algorithms.
Besides, prescriptive analytics uses sophisticated tools and technologies,
like machine learning, business rules and algorithms, which makes it
sophisticated to implement and manage. That is why, before deciding to
adopt prescriptive analytics, a company should compare required efforts
vs. an expected added value.

What types of data analytics do companies choose?

To identify if there is a prevailing type of data analytics, let’s turn to recent

surveys on the topic.

For the Global Data and Analytics Survey: Big Decisions, PwC asked more
than 2,000 executives to choose a category that describes their company’s
decision-making process best. Further, C-suite was questioned with what
type of analytics they rely on most. The results were the following:
descriptive analytics dominates (58%) in the “Rarely data-driven decision-
making” category; diagnostic analytics tops the list (34%) in the “Somewhat
data-driven” category, while it is closely followed by descriptive (29%) and
prescriptive (28%) analytics; predictive analytics (36%) leads in the “Highly
data-driven” category.

This survey proves that at different stages of a company’s development,

there appears a need for one or the other type of analytics. In fact, the
companies that strive for informed decision-making, find descriptive
analytics insufficient, and add up diagnostics analytics or even go as far as
predictive one.

The same survey reveals another trend. Executives want decision-making

to be faster and more sophisticated. This means that more businesses will
strive to gradually enlarge the share of predictive analytics.
Another survey of business intelligence trends for 2017 carried by BARC
proves this hypothesis: 2,800 executives confirmed the growing importance
of predictive analytics and data mining.

To sum up

With various types of analytics, companies are free to choose how deep
they need to dive in data analysis to satisfy their business needs best.
While descriptive and diagnostic analytics offers a reactive approach,
predictive and prescriptive analytics makes users proactive. Meanwhile,
current trends show that more and more companies come to the situation
when they need advanced data analysis, and choose to adopt it.

Data analytics and consulting services

Are you striving for informed decision-making? We will convert your
historical and real-time data into actionable insights and set up forecasting.

Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful

patterns in data and applying those patterns towards effective decision
making. In other words, analytics can be understood as the connective
tissue between data and effective decision making, within an organization.
Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies
on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer
programming and operations research to quantify performance.

Organizations may apply analytics to business data to describe, predict,

and improve business performance. Specifically, areas within analytics
include predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, enterprise decision
management, descriptive analytics, cognitive analytics, Big Data Analytics,
retail analytics, supply chain analytics, store assortment and stock-keeping
unit optimization, marketing optimization and marketing mix modeling, web
analytics, call analytics, speech analytics, sales force sizing and optimization,
price and promotion modeling, predictive science, credit risk analysis,
and fraud analytics. Since analytics can require extensive computation
(see big data), the algorithms and software used for analytics harness the
most current methods in computer science, statistics, and mathematics.[1]
Analysis is focused on understanding the past; what happened. Analytics
focuses on why it happened and what will happen next.[2]

Data analytics is a multidisciplinary field. There is extensive use of computer

skills, mathematics and statistics, the use of descriptive techniques and
predictive models to gain valuable knowledge from data.[citation needed].
The insights from data are used to recommend action or to guide decision
making rooted in business context. Thus, analytics is not so much
concerned with individual analyses or analysis steps, but with the
entire methodology[according to whom?]. There is a pronounced tendency to
use the term analytics in business settings e.g. text analytics vs. the more
generic text mining to emphasize this broader perspective.[citation
needed] There is an increasing use of the term advanced analytics,[citation
needed] typically used to describe the technical aspects of analytics,
especially in the emerging fields such as the use of machine
learning techniques like neural networks, Decision Tree, Logistic Regression,
linear to multiple regression analysis, Classification to do predictive
modeling. It also includes Unsupervised Machine learning techniques like
cluster analysis, Principal Component Analysis, segmentation profile
analysis and association analysis.

Application of analytics[edit]

Marketing optimization[edit]

Marketing has evolved from a creative process into a highly data-driven

process. Marketing organizations use analytics to determine the outcomes
of campaigns or efforts and to guide decisions for investment and
consumer targeting. Demographic studies, customer segmentation,
conjoint analysis and other techniques allow marketers to use large
amounts of consumer purchase, survey and panel data to understand and
communicate marketing strategy.
Web analytics allows marketers to collect session-level information about
interactions on a website using an operation called sessionization. Google
Analytics is an example of a popular free analytics tool that marketers use
for this purpose. Those interactions provide web analytics information
systems with the information necessary to track the referrer, search
keywords, identify IP address, and track activities of the visitor. With this
information, a marketer can improve marketing campaigns, website
creative content, and information architecture.

Analysis techniques frequently used in marketing include marketing mix

modeling, pricing and promotion analyses, sales force optimization and
customer analytics e.g.: segmentation. Web analytics and optimization of
web sites and online campaigns now frequently work hand in hand with the
more traditional marketing analysis techniques. A focus on digital media
has slightly changed the vocabulary so that marketing mix modeling is
commonly referred to as attribution modeling in the digital or marketing mix
modelingcontext.

These tools and techniques support both strategic marketing decisions

(such as how much overall to spend on marketing, how to allocate budgets
across a portfolio of brands and the marketing mix) and more tactical
campaign support, in terms of targeting the best potential customer with the
optimal message in the most cost effective medium at the ideal time.

People analytics[edit]

People Analytics is using behavioral data to understand how people work

and change how companies are managed.[3]

People analytics is also known as workforce analytics, HR analytics, talent

analytics, people insights, talent insights, colleague insights, human capital
analytics, and HRIS analytics.[4] HR analytics is the application of analytics
to help companies manage human resources.[citation needed] The aim is to
discern which employees to hire, which to reward or promote, what
responsibilities to assign, and similar human resource problems.[5] HR
analytics is becoming increasingly important to understand what kind of
behavioral profiles would succeed and fail. For example, an analysis may
find that individuals that fit a certain type of profile are those most likely to
succeed at a particular role, making them the best employees to hire.

However, there are key differences between people analytics and HR

analytics. "People Analytics solves business problems. HR Analytics solves
HR problems. People Analytics looks at the work and its social
organization. HR Analytics measures and integrates data about HR
administrative processes," says Ben Waber, MIT Media Lab Ph.D. and CEO
of Humanyze.[6] Josh Bersin, founder and principal at Bersin
by Deloitte agrees that people analytics is a larger industry than HR
Analytics, explaining, "… over time, I believe it doesn't even belong within
HR. While it may reside in HR to begin with, over time this team takes
responsible for analysis of sales productivity, turnover, retention, accidents,
fraud, and even the people-issues that drive customer retention and
customer satisfaction… These are all real-world business problems, not HR
problems."[7]

Portfolio analytics[edit]

A common application of business analytics is portfolio analysis. In this,

a bank or lending agency has a collection of accounts of
varying value and risk. The accounts may differ by the social status
(wealthy, middle-class, poor, etc.) of the holder, the geographical location,
its net value, and many other factors. The lender must balance the return
on the loan with the risk of default for each loan. The question is then how
to evaluate the portfolio as a whole.

The least risk loan may be to the very wealthy, but there are a very limited
number of wealthy people. On the other hand, there are many poor that
can be lent to, but at greater risk. Some balance must be struck that
maximizes return and minimizes risk. The analytics solution may
combine time series analysis with many other issues in order to make
decisions on when to lend money to these different borrower segments, or
decisions on the interest rate charged to members of a portfolio segment to
cover any losses among members in that segment.

Risk analytics[edit]

Predictive models in the banking industry are developed to bring certainty

across the risk scores for individual customers. Credit scores are built to
predict individual's delinquency behavior and widely used to evaluate the
credit worthiness of each applicant. Furthermore, risk analyses are carried
out in the scientific world and the insurance industry. It is also extensively
used in financial institutions like Online Payment Gateway companies to
analyse if a transaction was genuine or fraud. For this purpose they use the
transaction history of the customer. This is more commonly used in Credit
Card purchase, when there is a sudden spike in the customer transaction
volume the customer gets a call of confirmation if the transaction was
initiated by him/her. This helps in reducing loss due to such circumstances.

Digital analytics[edit]

Digital analytics is a set of business and technical activities that define,

create, collect, verify or transform digital data into reporting, research,
analyses, recommendations, optimizations, predictions, and
automations.[8] This also includes the SEO (search engine optimization)
where the keyword search is tracked and that data is used for marketing
purposes. Even banner ads and clicks come under digital analytics. A
growing number of brands and marketing firms rely on digital analytics for
their digital marketing assignments, where MROI (Marketing Return on
Investment) is an important key performance indicator (KPI).

Security analytics[edit]

Security analytics refers to information technology (IT) to gather and

analyze security events to understand and analyze events that pose the
greatest risk.[9] Products in this area include security information and event
management and user behavior analytics.
Software analytics[edit]

Main article: Software analytics

Software analytics is the process of collecting information about the way a

piece of software is used and produced.

Challenges[edit]

In the industry of commercial analytics software, an emphasis has emerged

on solving the challenges of analyzing massive, complex data sets, often
when such data is in a constant state of change. Such data sets are
commonly referred to as big data. Whereas once the problems posed by big
data were only found in the scientific community, today big data is a
problem for many businesses that operate transactional systems online
and, as a result, amass large volumes of data quickly.[10]

The analysis of unstructured data types is another challenge getting

attention in the industry. Unstructured data differs from structured data in
that its format varies widely and cannot be stored in traditional relational
databases without significant effort at data transformation.[11] Sources of
unstructured data, such as email, the contents of word processor
documents, PDFs, geospatial data, etc., are rapidly becoming a relevant
source of business intelligence for businesses, governments and
universities.[12] For example, in Britain the discovery that one company
was illegally selling fraudulent doctor's notes in order to assist people in
defrauding employers and insurance companies,[13] is an opportunity for
insurance firms to increase the vigilance of their unstructured data analysis.
The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that big data analysis could save
the American health care system $300 billion per year and the European
public sector €250 billion.[14]

These challenges are the current inspiration for much of the innovation in
modern analytics information systems, giving birth to relatively new
machine analysis concepts such as complex event processing, full text search
and analysis, and even new ideas in presentation.[15] One such innovation
is the introduction of grid-like architecture in machine analysis, allowing
increases in the speed of massively parallel processing by distributing the
workload to many computers all with equal access to the complete data
set.[16]

Analytics is increasingly used in education, particularly at the district and

government office levels. However, the complexity of student performance
measures presents challenges when educators try to understand and use
analytics to discern patterns in student performance, predict graduation
likelihood, improve chances of student success, etc. For example, in a
study involving districts known for strong data use, 48% of teachers had
difficulty posing questions prompted by data, 36% did not comprehend
given data, and 52% incorrectly interpreted data.[17] To combat this, some
analytics tools for educators adhere to an over-the-counter data format
(embedding labels, supplemental documentation, and a help system, and
making key package/display and content decisions) to improve educators'
understanding and use of the analytics being displayed.[18]

One more emerging challenge is dynamic regulatory needs. For example,

in the banking industry, Basel III and future capital adequacy needs are
likely to make even smaller banks adopt internal risk models. In such
cases, cloud computing and open source programming language R can
help smaller banks to adopt risk analytics and support branch level
monitoring by applying predictive analytics.[citation needed]

Risks

The main risk for the people is discrimination like price

discrimination or statistical discrimination. See Scientific American book review of
"Weapons of math destruction"

There is also the risk that a developer could profit from the ideas or work
done by users, like this example: Users could write new ideas in a note
taking app, which could then be sent as a custom event, and the
developers could profit from those ideas. This can happen because the
ownership of content is usually unclear in the law.[19]

If a user's identity is not protected, there are more risks; for example, the
risk that private information about users is made public on the internet.

In the extreme, there is the risk that governments could gather too much
private information, now that the governments are giving themselves more
powers to access citizens' information.

Data analysis has two prominent methods: qualitative

research and quantitative research. Each method has their own
techniques. Interviews and observations are forms of qualitative research,
while experiments and surveys are quantitative research.

Business analytics applications

Business analytics tools come in several different varieties:

Data visualization tools

Business intelligence reporting software

Self-service analytics platforms

Statistical analysis tools

Big data platforms

Self-service has become a major trend among business analytics tools.

Users now demand software that is easy to use and doesn't require
specialized training. This has led to the rise of simple-to-use tools from
companies such as Tableau and Qlik, among others. These tools can be
installed on a single computer for small applications or in server
environments for enterprise-wide deployments. Once they are up and
running, business analysts and others with less specialized training can
use them to generate reports, charts and web portals that track specific
metrics in data sets.

Once the business goal of the analysis is determined, an analysis

methodology is selected and data is acquired to support the analysis. Data
acquisition often involves extraction from one or more business
systems, data cleansing and integration into a single repository, such as a data
or data mart. The analysis is typically performed against a smaller
warehouse
sample set of data.

Analytics tools range from spreadsheets with statistical functions to

complex data mining and predictive modeling applications. As patterns and
relationships in the data are uncovered, new questions are asked, and the
analytical process iterates until the business goal is met.

Deployment of predictive models involves scoring data records -- typically

in a database -- and using the scores to optimize real-time decisions within
applications and business processes. BA also supports tactical decision-
making in response to unforeseen events. And, in many cases, the
decision-making is automated to support real-time responses.

=======================================================
How Business Analytics Can Help Your
Business

Companies have widely embraced the use of analytics to streamline

operations and improve processes.

But implementing analytics data that informs intelligent and effective

business decisions is not as easy as a snap of the fingers.

In a survey conducted by Blootmberg Businessweek Research Services,

nearly 97% of respondents reported their companies have adopted
analytics.

The three most sought-after goals were the ability to reduce costs, increase
profitability and improve risk management.
However, many organizations struggle with making sure the data is
accurate and consistent.

Analytics data is everywhere and sorting through it to find what is useful

and pertinent to your business is a necessary skill to be effective in the
current marketplace.

These days, analytics is being used to determine everything from Supreme

Court case outcomes to personalized marketing efforts. The challenge is to
understand how analytics can help your business and begin to address any
issues you believe are most important to short- and long-term success.

Analyzing Data to Identify Business Opportunities

Analyzing data more often than not increases efficiency, but also
helps identify new business opportunities that may have been otherwise
overlooked, such as untapped customer segments. In doing so, the
potential for growth and profitability becomes endless and more
intelligence based.

Many professionals can discern short-term trends but are less proficient at
predicting obstacles that plague their business down the road. Computer
models based on data analytics help companies see shifts in what
customers buy and give a clear picture of what products should be
highlighted or updated. Whether it’s a production concern, a customer
service issue or a deficiency among your employees, analytics can help to
highlight key areas of concern when it comes to your venture’s ability to
make a profit.

Big data has also been used as an HR tool to recruit prospective job
candidates. Collecting data from many different sources allows companies
to assess a candidate’s skills and traits to help determine how they could fit
into the corporate culture and workplace.
Using Analytics to Prevent Shipping Breakdowns

Shipping companies are tasked with the logistics challenge of delivering

millions of packages each day. Many have turned to analytics to maximize
the performance and reliability of their vehicles. By looking at sensor data
from each vehicle within a shipping fleet, companies can keep track of the
state of the parts in the vehicle and determine what parts may prove to be
problematic.

Addressing problem areas before they become major issues makes it

possible for companies to ensure their vehicles stay on the road and don’t
interrupt the flow of business – reducing driver downtime, overall
maintenance cost, and customer dissatisfaction. By incorporating analytics
into their approach to mechanical maintenance, the shipping industry has
made itself more efficient.

Better Targeting Customers with Business Analytics

An analysis by McKinsey & Company showed that using data to make

better marketing decisions can increase marketing productivity by 15-20%.
A good example of this is retail giant Target’s “pregnancy prediction score.”
Target assigns a score based on a customer’s purchases that indicate the
possibility of a pregnancy; the retailer uses purchase data to determine the
types of coupons and special discounts Target would send to a customer’s
email address.

There is a ton of information companies can use for predictive analytics that
help streamline a customer’s experience with a brand. Finding the right
tools to examine your customer’s buying and Internet browsing habits, and
implementing them to provide reliable and actionable intelligence can
activate buyer instincts and embed your brand into customers’ minds.

Improve Internal Processes with Data

Through data analysis, business operators can get a clearer view of what
they are doing efficiently and inefficiently within their organizations. When
a problem is identified, professionals with an analytics background are
capable of answering crucial questions such as:

 What was the cause of the problem? (Reports)

  Why did it happen? (Diagnosis)
 What will happen in the future? (Predictions)
 What is the best way forward? (Recommendations)

Data mining and analysis will help you answer these questions and have
confidence that you’re moving forward with the best approach. Data is now
capable of improving any business process, whether it’s streamlining the
communication in your supply chain or improving the quality and relevance
of your offerings.

Business analytics examples

Business analytics techniques break down into two main areas. The first is
basic business intelligence. This involves examining historical data to get a sense
of how a business department, team or staff member performed over a particular
time. This is a mature practice that most enterprises are fairly accomplished at
using.

The second area of business analytics involves deeper statistical analysis. This may
mean doing predictive analytics by applying statistical algorithms to historical data
to make a prediction about future performance of a product, service or website
design change. Or, it could mean using other advanced analytics techniques, like
cluster analysis, to group customers based on similarities across several data
points. This can be helpful in targeted marketing campaigns, for example.

Specific types of business analytics include:

 Descriptive analytics, which tracks key performance indicators to understand

the present state of a business;
 Predictive analytics, which analyzes trend data to assess the likelihood of
future outcomes; and

 Prescriptive analytics, which uses past performance to generate

recommendations about how to handle similar situations in the future.

While the two components of business analytics -- business intelligence and

advanced analytics -- are sometimes used interchangeably, there are some key
differences between these two business analytics techniques:

Business analytics vs. data science

The more advanced areas of business analytics can start to resemble data science,
but there is a distinction. Even when advanced statistical algorithms are applied to
data sets, it doesn't necessarily mean data science is involved. There are a host of
business analytics tools that can perform these kinds of functions automatically,
requiring few of the special skills involved in data science.

True data science involves more custom coding and more open-ended
questions. Data scientists generally don't set out to solve a specific question, as
most business analysts do. Rather, they will explore data using advanced statistical
methods and allow the features in the data to guide their analysis.
 Business Intelligence
(BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and
presenting actionable information to help executives,
managers and other corporate end users make informed
business decisions.

BI encompasses a wide variety of tools, applications and

methodologies that enable organizations
1. to collect data from internal systems and external
sources
2. prepare it for analysis

3. Analysis of that data and

4. create reports, dashboards and

5. data visualizations to make the analytical results

available to corporate decision-makers, as well as
operational workers.
Why is business intelligence important?
The potential benefits of business intelligence tools include
1. accelerating and improving decision-making,
2. optimizing internal business processes
3. increasing operational efficiency
4. driving new revenues and
5. gaining competitive advantage over business rivals.

BI systems can also help companies identify market trends

and spot business problems that need to be addressed.

BI data can include historical information stored in a data

warehouse, as well as new data gathered from source
systems as it is generated, enabling BI tools to support both
strategic and tactical decision-making processes.

Initially, BI tools were primarily used by data analysts and

other IT professionals who ran analyses and produced
reports with query results for business users.
Increasingly, however, business executives and workers
are using BI platforms themselves, thanks partly to the
development of self-service BI and data discovery tools
and dashboards.

Benefits and Advantages of Business Intelligence

Systems
Faster reporting, analysis or planning.
More accurate reporting, analysis or planning.
Better business decisions.
Improved data quality.
Improved employee satisfaction.
Improved operational efficiency.
Improved customer satisfaction.
Increased competitive advantage.
Types of BI tools
Business intelligence combines a broad set of data analysis
applications, including ad hoc analytics and querying,
enterprise reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP),
mobile BI, real-time BI, operational BI, cloud and
software-as-a-service BI, open source BI, collaborative BI,
and location intelligence.

BI technology also includes data visualization software for

designing charts and other infographics, as well as tools
for building BI dashboards and performance scorecards
that display visualized data on business metrics and key
performance indicators in an easy-to-grasp way.

Data visualization tools have become the standard of

modern BI in recent years. A couple leading vendors
defined the technology early on, but more traditional BI
vendors have followed in their path. Now, virtually every
major BI tool incorporates features of visual data
discovery.
BI programs may also incorporate forms of advanced
analytics, such as data mining, predictive analytics, text
mining, statistical analysis and big data analytics. In many
cases, though, advanced analytic s projects are conducted
and managed by separate teams of data scientists,
statisticians, predictive modelers and other skilled
analytics professionals, while BI teams oversee more
straightforward querying and analysis of business data.

Business intelligence data is typically stored in a data

warehouse or in smaller data marts that hold subsets of a
company's information. In addition, Hadoop systems are
increasingly being used within BI architectures as
repositories or landing pads for BI and analytics data --
especially for unstructured data, log files, sensor data and
other types of big data.

Before it's used in BI applications, raw data from different

source systems must be integrated, consolidated and
cleansed using data integration and data quality tools to
ensure that users are analyzing accurate and consistent
information.
BI trends
In addition to BI managers, business intelligence teams
generally include a mix of BI architects, BI developers,
business analysts and data management professionals.
Business users are also often included to represent the
business side and make sure its needs are met in the BI
development process.
To help with that, a growing number of organizations are
replacing traditional waterfall development with Agile BI
and data warehousing approaches that use Agile software
development techniques to break up BI projects into small
chunks and deliver new functionality to business analysts
on an incremental and iterative basis.
Doing so can enable companies to put BI features into use
more quickly and to refine or modify development plans
as business needs change or as new requirements emerge
and take priority over earlier ones.
 Supply Chain Management & ANALYTICS

Professionals (CSCMP) define supply-chain management as follows:

Supply Chain Management encompasses the planning and management of all

activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and
all logistics management activities.

Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners,

which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third-party service providers, and customers.

The term "logistics" applies to activities within one company or organization

involving product distribution,

whereas "supply chain" additionally encompasses manufacturing and procurement,

and therefore has a much broader focus as it involves multiple enterprises (including
suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers) working together to meet a customer need
for a product or service.

Starting in the 1990s, several companies chose to outsource the logistics aspect of
supply-chain management by partnering with a third-party logistics provider (3PL).

Companies also outsource production to contract manufacturers.

Technology companies have risen to meet the demand to help manage these
complex systems.

In essence, supply chain management integrates supply and demand management

within and across companies.

Supply Chain Management is an integrating function with primary responsibility for

linking major business functions and business processes within and across
companies into a cohesive and high-performing business model.
It includes all of the logistics management activities noted above, as well as
manufacturing operations, and it drives coordination of processes and activities with
and across marketing, sales, product design, finance and information technology.

A typical supply chain begins with the ecological, biological, and political regulation
of natural resources, followed by the human extraction of raw material, and includes
several production links (e.g., component construction, assembly, and merging)
before moving on to several layers of storage facilities of ever-decreasing size and
increasingly remote geographical locations, and finally reaching the consumer.

The basic idea behind SCM is that companies and corporations involve themselves
in a supply chain by exchanging information about market fluctuations and
production capabilities.

If all relevant information is accessible to any relevant company, every company in

the supply chain has the ability to help optimize the entire supply chain rather than
to sub-optimize based on a local interest.

This will lead to better-planned overall production and distribution, which can cut
costs and give a more attractive final product, leading to better sales and better
overall results for the companies involved. This is one form of vertical integration.

The primary objective of SCM is to fulfill customer demands through the most
efficient use of resources, including distribution capacity, inventory, and labor.

In theory, a supply chain seeks to match demand with supply and do so with the
minimal inventory.
 Supply Chain Analytics (SCA)
SCA is helping to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness by enabling data-
driven decisions at strategic, operational and tactical levels.

The supply chain is a great place to use analytic tools to look for a competitive
advantage, because of its complexity and also because of the prominent role supply
chain plays in a company’s cost structure and profitability.

Supply chains can appear simple compared to other parts of a business, even though
they are not.

If we keep an open mind, we can always do better by digging deeper into data as
well as by thinking about a predictive instead of reactive view of the data.

Supply chain analytics is a system that facilitates the execution of products and
services from supplier to customer.

Supply chain systems incorporate several components such as information,

organizations, people, activities and resources to change raw materials into finished
goods.

The supply hierarchy of manufactures, suppliers, retailers, wholesalers and

customers is followed in supply chain analytics (SCA).

Supply chain analytics has turned out to be a necessity for organizations in order to
efficiently penetrate into the market.

Supply chain analytics stresses on releasing the cash by enhancing forecast accuracy,
support network reconfiguration, minimizing material wastage, optimize service
levels, reducing inventory etc.

Supply chain analytics offers services across industries such as defense, automotive,
manufacturing, electronics and high tech, aerospace, healthcare, life sciences, retail
among others and consumer packaged goods.

The global Supply Chain Analytics Market is estimated to grow with a 16.46%
CAGR during 2016-2023.
Factors driving supply chain analytics market includes:

 High demand of inventory management

 Low cost for sourcing and logistics
 High awareness towards a “SMARTER” supply chain
 High improvement in logistics processes
 Flexible collaborative planning and decision making across functions
 Factors such as lack of data visibility in real-time in the national or
international business;
- no particular way to modernize processes within planning and execution;
- no flexibility within the network and imbalance in product line are all
hindering the growth of supply chain analytics market.

Supply chain analytics is a complex process that involves various industries and
organizations with different goals and objectives.

This process mainly includes an application of mathematics, predictive modeling,

statistics and machine-learning techniques for designing and managing a supply
chain.

Supply chain analytics contains complete value chain: sourcing, distribution,

manufacturing, and logistics.

It helps business professionals to make data-driven decisions at both strategic and

operational levels to enhance the operational efficiency and effectiveness of the
industries.

Increasing awareness about the benefits of supply chain analytics can help in
predicting accuracy along with increasing product life cycles and fluctuating
customer demands have been driving the global supply chain market.

Apart from this, growing concern of security of data and lag in deployment might
hinder the overall growth at a global level.
Various aspects of Analytics to optimize the supply chain process include
 liaising with suppliers to eliminate bottlenecks;
 sourcing strategically to strike a balance between lowest material
cost and transportation,
 implementing just-in-time techniques to optimize manufacturing flow;
 maintaining the right mix and location of factories and warehouses to
serve customer markets; and
 using location allocation, vehicle routing analysis, dynamic programming,
and
 traditional logistics optimization to maximize the efficiency of distribution.

Supply chain analytics at its essence is about transforming all the gathered historical
data and incoming flow of current supply chain data into insights for making better
planning decisions.

(i) Descriptive analytics

which includes KPI tracking and internal reporting metrics based on historical data
such as what sold where and how many provides the baseline analytics foundation.

(ii) Diagnostic analytics

takes the data a step further by pointing to the root-cause of issues based on patterns
in the historical data, enabling directional guidance for faster reactions to fix
problems.

(iii) Predictive analytics

uses statistical techniques to estimate the likelihood of future events such as stock
outs or movements in your product's demand curve. It provides the foresight for
focused decision making that avoids likely problems in the future.

(iv) Prescriptive analytics

closes the loop by tying all the analytics components into actions and automated
decisions (with exceptions based planning) to improve the bottom line supply chain
results.

All these insights can be helpful to empower supply chain managers to make better
supply chain decisions.

For further information, I recommend you to take a look at our resource explaining
the different aspects of supply chain analytics.
Supply chain analysis is the use of data in the design, planning and management of
the supply chain.

In particular in the fields of demand sensing, forecasting and performance

measurement but also in the area of monitoring the supply chain ecosystem to detect
drivers of potential disruptions to launch preemptive measures.

Supply Chain Analytics refers the to the improvement in the operational efficiency
and effectiveness by enabling data-driven decisions at strategic, operational and
tactical levels. It encompasses virtually the complete value chain: sourcing,
manufacturing, distribution and logistics.

Supply Chain is a tricky business. One missing entity or a lack of synchronization

can break the entire chain and mean millions in losses for a company.

However, the use of analytics in the supply chain is resolving several pain points in
supply chain management at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.

According to Capgemini Analytics, “Supply Chain Analytics brings data-driven

intelligence to your business, reducing the overall cost to serve and improving
service levels.” For supply chain professionals, it can only mean one thing – to
upskill to be able to use advanced analytics to improve operational efficiency and
make data-driven decisions.

For most companies, the word analytics is synonymous with reporting.

But despite thirty years of supply chain technology evolution, the most commonly
used system for supply chain planning is a spreadsheet.

Companies cannot effectively model the trade-offs of growth, profitability, supply

chain cycles such as procure to pay and inventory turns, and business operations
complexity on a spreadsheet.

As that complexity increases, most companies are unable to use supply chain
analytics to improve operating margin and inventory cycles.

Secondly, companies are not able to effectively balance the trade-offs in the value
network.
Today, only 11% of companies have the capabilities that they need to evaluate a
“what-if analysis” and only 24% of companies are able to model profitability impacts
of changing conditions in their complex systems.

Managing the trade-offs of inventory, customer service and costs of supply chain
source, make and deliver needs to be done but the systems are not aligned to help
managers to understand the inter-connectedness. While there are dashboards and
reports that show the numbers about what is happening there is no why—the
understanding of the inter-related nature of what is possible based on the potential
of the supply chain.

Here are 5 important use of analytics in the supply chain that will motivate
professionals in this domain to upskill:

1) Identify the most efficient shipping carriers through advanced analytics –

One of the issues that a Fortune 100 CPG company faced was assessing each carrier
and choosing the right carrier for shipment across the globe. Since there were
various metrics available, the challenge was ranking carrier performance and
choosing the right one for shipping. Understanding the carrier selection framework,
the solution by Fractal Analysis followed a step-wise approach by identifying
correlated attributes, ranking of carriers, and assessing alternate carriers via what-if
analysis.

2) Pierian Digital delivered interface, forecasting, and visibility solution to oil & gas
major –

A Global EPC Service Provider was facing issues without a common user interface
across applications to provide end-to-end visibility, visibility of global supply chain
and logistics processes, and forecasting for cost and schedule. Pierian Digital’s
solution provided Proactive Supply Chain Performance Management Analytics
insights positively impacting the top and bottom-line business growth specifically
through improvements across the whole supply chain. Read the full details here.

3) Gartner Analyzes Market for Supply Chain Management Solution –

A Fortune 500 company knew its innovative solution to supply chain management
had huge potential, however, management needed the validation of the market, the
competitive landscape, and opportunities to secure funding. A Gartner engagement
answered all their questions by conducting a full product assessment, sizing the
market, and analyzing competitive alternatives. Read more.

4) Improved forecasting and inventory planning for a large retailer –

Mu Sigma helped one of UK’s leading fashion retailer to build a customized demand
forecasting and inventory planning solution for its online channel involving apparel
and home furnishing products. They developed an analytical process to forecast
demand and estimate launch quantities for new products during seasonal sales
leading to an increase in product availability by 8%. Read the case study here.

5) Use predictive modelling to control critical process parameters –

A Fortune 100 fertilizer manufacturing company produces fertilizers that must meet
quality criteria for key natural elements like potassium, nitrogen, and phosphorus to
be within a defined range of specification. The results of thorough data
understanding and brainstorming determined that for water soluble fertilizers, in
98.4% of instances the prediction accuracy was greater than 95%. For other nutrient
products, in 99.9% of instances, the prediction accuracy was greater than 95%. The
client saw multi-million-dollar savings through these tools in fine-tuning the
manufacturing process. Read fractal analytics’ 4-step approach to know the full
solution.
 Market research And Market Analytics

Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets or customers.
It is a very important component of business strategy.

Marketing research is "the process or set of processes that links the producers, customers, and end
users to the marketer through information used to identify.

Define marketing opportunities and problems;

generate
refine and
evaluate marketing actions;
monitor marketing performance; and
improve understanding of marketing as a process.
Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues, designs the method
for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyzes the
results, and communicates the findings and their implications."

It is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about
issues relating to marketing products and services.
The goal of marketing research is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing
mix impacts customer behavior.

The term is commonly interchanged with marketing research; however, expert practitioners may
wish to draw a distinction, in that marketing research is concerned specifically about marketing
processes, while market research is concerned specifically with markets
Factors that can be investigated through market research include:

 Market information: Through market information one can know the prices of different
commodities in the market, as well as the supply and demand situation. Market researchers
have a wider role than previously recognized by helping their clients to understand social,
technical, and even legal aspects of markets.[5]

 Market segmentation: Market segmentation is the division of the market or population into
subgroups with similar motivations. It is widely used for segmenting on geographic
differences, demographic differences (age, gender, ethnicity,
etc.), technographic differences, psychographic differences, and differences in product use. For
B2B segmentation firmographics is commonly used.

 Market trends: Market trends are the upward or downward movement of a market, during a
period of time. Determining the market size may be more difficult if one is starting with a new
innovation. In this case, you will have to derive the figures from the number of potential
customers, or customer segments.
 SWOT analysis: SWOT is a written analysis of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and
Threats to a business entity. A SWOT may also be written up for the competition to understand
how to develop the marketing and product mixes.

Market research is one of the main factors used in maintaining competitiveness over competitors.

Market research provides important information which helps to identify and analyze the needs of
the market, the market size and the competition.

Market-research techniques encompass both qualitative techniques such as focus groups, in-depth
interviews, and ethnography, as well as quantitative techniques such as customer surveys, and
analysis of secondary data.

Market research, which includes social and opinion research, is the systematic gathering and
interpretation of information about individuals or organizations using statistical and analytical
methods and techniques of the applied social sciences to gain insight or support decision
making.[3]
Marketing research is often partitioned into two sets of categorical pairs, either by target market:

 Consumer marketing research, and

 Business-to-business (B2B) marketing research.

Or, alternatively, by methodological approach:

 Qualitative marketing research, and

 Quantitative marketing research.

Consumer marketing research is a form of applied sociology that concentrates on understanding

the preferences, attitudes, and behaviors of consumers in a market-based economy, and it aims to
understand the effects and comparative success of marketing campaigns.[citation needed]

The field of consumer marketing research as a statistical science was pioneered by Arthur
Nielsen with the founding of the ACNielsen Company in 1923.[3]
Thus, marketing research may also be described as the systematic and objective identification,
collection, analysis, and dissemination of information for the purpose of assisting management
in decision making related to the identification and solution of problems and opportunities in
marketing.[4]

The goal of market research is to obtain and provide management with viable information about
the market (e.g. competitors), consumers, the product/service itself etc.
The purpose of marketing research (MR) is to provide management with relevant, accurate,
reliable, valid, and up to date market information.
Competitive marketing environment and the ever-increasing costs attributed to poor decision
making require that marketing research provide sound information.

Sound decisions are not based on gut feeling, intuition, or even pure judgment.
Managers make numerous strategic and tactical decisions in the process of identifying and
satisfying customer needs.
They make decisions about potential opportunities, target market selection, market segmentation,
planning and implementing marketing programs, marketing performance, and control.
These decisions are complicated by interactions between the controllable marketing variables of
product, pricing, promotion, and distribution.

Further complications are added by uncontrollable environmental factors such as general

economic conditions, technology, public policies and laws, political environment, competition,
and social and cultural changes.
Another factor in this mix is the complexity of consumers.
Marketing research helps the marketing manager link the marketing variables with the
environment and the consumers.
It helps remove some of the uncertainty by providing relevant information about the marketing
variables, environment, and consumers.
In the absence of relevant information, consumers' response to marketing programs cannot be
predicted reliably or accurately.

Ongoing marketing research programs provide information on controllable and non-controllable

factors and consumers; this information enhances the effectiveness of decisions made by
marketing managers.
Traditionally, marketing researchers were responsible for providing the relevant information and
marketing decisions were made by the managers.

However, the roles are changing and marketing researchers are becoming more involved in
decision making, whereas marketing managers are becoming more involved with research.

The role of marketing research in managerial decision making is explained further using the
framework of the DECIDE model.
Marketing Analytics – Success through Analysis

Understanding Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing and analyzing marketing
performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI).

Marketing analytics allows marketers to be more efficient at their jobs and minimize wasted
marketing amount.

Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation applications, marketing analytics can offer
profound insights into customer preferences and trends.

Despite these compelling benefits, a majority of organizations fail to ever realize the promises of
marketing analytics.
According to a survey of senior marketing executives published in the Harvard Business Review,
"more than 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI."

Figure 1: A Survey of Sr. Marketing Executives on their Marketing Analytics Effectiveness

However, with the advent of search engines, paid search marketing, search engine optimization,
and powerful new software products from Word Stream, marketing analytics is more powerful
and easier to implement than ever.
The Importance of Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics, Internet (or Web) marketing analytics in particular, allow you to monitor
campaigns and their respective outcomes, enabling you to spend each amount as effectively as
possible.

The importance of marketing analytics is obvious: if something costs more than it returns, it's not a
good long-term business strategy.

In a 2008 study, the Lenskold Group found that "companies making improvements in their
measurement and ROI capabilities were more likely to report outgrowing competitors and a
higher level of effectiveness and efficiency in their marketing." Simply put: Knowledge is power.

In search marketing in particular, one of the most powerful marketing performance metrics comes
in the form of keywords.
Keywords tell you exactly what is on the mind of your current and potential customers.
In fact, the most valuable long-term benefit of engaging in paid and natural search marketing isn't
incremental traffic to your website, it's the keyword data contained within each click which can be
utliized to inform and optimize other business processes.

 Product Design: Keywords can reveal exactly what features or solutions your customers are
looking for.
 Customer Surveys: By examining keyword frequency data you can infer the relative
priorities of competing interests.
 Industry Trends: By monitoring the relative change in keyword frequencies you can identify
and predict trends in customer behavior.
 Customer Support: Understand where customers are struggling the most and how support
resources should be deployed.
Marketing Analytics: How and Where to Start

The Web is clearly the only game in town. Statistics show that almost 90% of the entire North
American population is online.

The quickest and easiest way to reach out to this huge market is through paid search marketing,
for example, advertising on Google AdWords or through other search engines.

Reports and information received from search marketing help in all areas of your business,
including offline revenue and product development.

When implementing your search efforts, be sure keep these five tips in mind.
Five Online Marketing Tips:

 Start with Keyword Research: A stagnant keyword list is dangerous as it neglects trends and
information on new products or developments.
 Set up some Paid Search Marketing Campaigns: Group keywords in relevant groups and
write appropriate ad text to help improve your Quality Score, which will lower your bid and
improve ad position.
 Analyze the Results: Displaying your keywords in ad text prove to the searcher and to
Google that your ad is relevant to their search.
 Implement Natural Search: Google estimates that 80% of searchers click on an organic
result over a paid advertisement. Incorporate your best performing keywords into your
website and continue to generate relevant content.
 Repeat Ad Nauseum: Negative keywords are great because they prevent unnecessary clicks
and spend, ensuring your advertisement displays only for applicable searches.

Improve Your Marketing Strategy with the AdWords Performance Grader

A successful online marketing strategy relies on a winning AdWords campaign.
The strength of your Adwords campaigns will dictate how well you rank in Google; without a
decent ranking, your site will never be seen by prospective clients.
Wordstream’s AdWords Performance Grader is a comprehensive Google AdWords analytics tool
that helps you evaluate how your AdWords campaigns are performing on several key criteria,
such as:

 Effective use of negative keywords

 Quality Score
 Long-tail keyword optimization
 Text ad optimization

The AdWords Performance Grader shows you where and how to make improvements to your
AdWords campaign that will improve your performance and save you money. It’s an expert
analysis, and it’s absolutely free! Consider utilizing this great tool in your efforts to improve your
online marketing campaign.
Use WordStream's AdWords Performance Grader to see how you stack up against competitors
and where you can improve your AdWords campaign.
Unlike most other marketing analysis tools, WordStream marries analytics and action. Don't just
gather data about your marketing campaigns; act on that data for better results!

Another factor that can be measured is marketing effectiveness. This includes:

 Customer analysis (Segmentation of target customers)

 Choice modelling
 Competitor analysis
 Risk analysis
 Product research
 Advertisement research
 Marketing mix modeling
 Simulated test marketing
UNIT 2: Big Data Analytics
Big data analytics is the often complex process of examining large and varied data sets -- or big data –

1. to uncover information including hidden patterns,

2. unknown correlations
3. market trends and
4. customer preferences

that can help organizations make informed business decisions.

As implied by its name, big data refers to an

immense volume of raw and

unstructured data from

diverse sources.
Owing to its high volume and high veracity nature, it often requires more computing power to gather and
analyze.

The data is usually deciphered through various digital channels like mobile, internet, social media, etc. and
are then used by business to make strategic decisions.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------
E222222222222222222222222222222222222.

Big data analytics is a form of advanced analytics, which involves complex applications with elements such
as predictive models, statistical algorithms and what-if analysis powered by high-performance analytics
systems.

Those three factors -- volume, velocity and variety -- became known as the 3Vs of big data.
The concept evolved at the beginning of 21st century, and every technology giant is now making use of Big
Data technologies.

Big Data refers to vast and voluminous data sets that may be structured or unstructured.

This massive amount of data is produced every day by businesses and users.

Big Data analytics is the process of examining the large data sets to underline insights and patterns.

Big data analytics applications enable big data analysts, data scientists, predictive modelers, statisticians
and other analytics professionals to analyze growing volumes of structured transaction data, plus other
forms of data that are often left untapped by conventional business intelligence (BI) and analytics programs.
That encompasses a mix of semi-structured and unstructured data --

For example,

1. Internet click stream data,

2. web server logs,
3. social media content,
4. text from customer emails and survey responses,
5. mobile phone records, and
6. machine data captured by sensors connected to the internet of things. IOT
Benefits of Using Big Data Analytics

As the volume of data continues to grow, its potential for business seems to be growing exponentially as
Big Data management solutions evolve allowing companies to turn raw data into relevant trends,
predictions, and projections with unprecedented accuracy.

Companies that use comprehensive Big Data analytics solutions reap the benefits, gaining even more
insights that drive intelligent decision-making.
Some of the benefits of Big Data analytics include…

 Identifying the root causes of failures and issues in real time

 Fully understanding the potential of data-driven marketing

 Generating customer offers based on their buying habits

 Improving customer engagement and increasing customer loyalty

 Re - evaluating risk portfolios quickly

 Personalizing the customer experience

 Adding value to online and offline customer interactions

 Advantages of Big Data Management Solutions

The best Big Data management solutions give companies the ability to aggregate a variety of data from
hundreds of sources in real time.

This results in better customer engagement through more effective inbound interactions and marketing
programs, which ultimately leads to greater customer lifetime value.

Big Data analytics powered by advanced Big Data management solutions gives organizations
comprehensive customer profiles, enabling the delivery of more personalized customer experiences at
every touch point throughout the buyer’s journey.
And, these top Big Data management solutions eliminate data silos so that organizations get a single, 360-
degree customer view that includes countless descriptive, calculated, and industry-specific metrics for
building detailed records of individual customer’s behavior.

These profiles, or what NGDATA calls “customer DNA,” give organizations a comprehensive understanding
of their customers through deep customer insights and operationalized analytics, which allow for omni-
channel impact.

Big Data may seem daunting, but with the right Big Data management solution, your organization can tackle
the data you need to get actionable insights and increase your customer lifetime value.

Industries getting Benefits of Big Data Analytics

There has been an enormous growth in the field of Big Data analytics with the benefits of the technology.
This has led to the use of big data in multiple industries ranging from

Banking

Healthcare

Energy

Technology
Consumer

Manufacturing

There are many other industries which use big data analytics.

Banking is seen as the field making the maximum use of Big Data Analytics.
The education sector is also making use of data analytics in a big way.

There are new options for research and analysis using data analytics.

The institutional data can be used for innovations by technical tools available today.

Due to immense opportunities, Data analytics has become an attractive option to study for students as well.

Why is big data analytics important?

Big data analytics helps organizations harness their data and use it to identify new opportunities.

That, in turn, leads to smarter business moves, more efficient operations, higher profits and happier
customers.

In his report Big Data in Big Companies, IIA Director of Research Tom Davenport interviewed more than 50
businesses to understand how they used big data.
He found they got value in the following ways:

1) Cost reduction.

Big data technologies such as Hadoop and cloud-based analytics bring significant cost advantages when it
comes to storing large amounts of data – plus they can identify more efficient ways of doing business.

2) Faster, better decision making.

With the speed of Hadoop and in-memory analytics, combined with the ability to analyze new sources of
data, businesses are able to analyze information immediately – and make decisions based on what they’ve
learned.
 3) New products and services.

With the ability to gauge customer needs and satisfaction through analytics comes the power to give
customers what they want. Davenport points out that with big data analytics, more companies are creating
new products to meet customers’ needs.

Application of Big Data and Data Analytics

Data is the baseline for almost all activities performed today. So much so that businesses now are forced to
adopt a data-focused approach to be successful.

This only means that there are great career prospects for the data experts now. Aspirants, who want to take
up a career in Big Data, should enroll for big data analytics courses online to become an expert.

Here is what Big Data do:

 Analyze bottlenecks in the system

 Detection of fraudulent transactions

 Build large scale data processing system

 Architect highly scalable distributed systems

 Find unexpected relationships between different variables

 Real-time analysis to monitor situation as it develops

==============1ST Internal April 2021=============

How it works and key technologies
There’s no single technology that encompasses big data analytics. Of course, there’s advanced analytics
that can be applied to big data,

but in reality several types of technology work together to help you get the most value from your
information.

Here are the biggest players:

Data management.
Data needs to be high quality and well-governed before it can be reliably analyzed.

With data constantly flowing in and out of an organization, it's important to establish repeatable processes
to build and maintain standards for data quality.

Once data is reliable, organizations should establish a master data management program that gets the entire
enterprise on the same page.

Data mining.

Data mining technology helps you examine large amounts of data to discover patterns in the data – and this
information can be used for further analysis to help answer complex business questions.

With data mining software, you can sift through all the chaotic and repetitive noise in data, pinpoint what's
relevant, use that information to assess likely outcomes, and then accelerate the pace of making informed
decisions.

Hadoop.

This open source software framework can store large amounts of data and run applications on clusters of
commodity hardware.
It has become a key technology to doing business due to the constant increase of data volumes and
varieties, and its distributed computing model processes big data fast.

An additional benefit is that Hadoop's open source framework is free and uses commodity hardware to store
large quantities of data.

In-memory analytics.

By analyzing data from system memory (instead of from your hard disk drive), you can derive immediate
insights from your data and act on them quickly.

This technology is able to remove data prep and analytical processing latencies to test new scenarios and
create models;

it's not only an easy way for organizations to stay agile and make better business decisions, it also enables
them to run iterative and interactive analytics scenarios.

Predictive analytics.

Predictive analytics technology uses data, statistical algorithms and machine-learning techniques to identify
the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data.
It's all about providing a best assessment on what will happen in the future, so organizations can feel more
confident that they're making the best possible business decision.

Some of the most common applications of predictive analytics include fraud detection, risk, operations and
marketing.

Text mining.

With text mining technology, you can analyze text data from the web, comment fields, books and other text-
based sources to uncover insights you hadn't noticed before.

Text mining uses machine learning or natural language processing technology to comb through documents –
emails, blogs, Twitter feeds, surveys, competitive intelligence and more – to help you analyze large amounts
of information and discover new topics and term relationships.

==================================================

Top tools used to store and analyse Big Data

BIG DATA
is a term used for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it is difficult to process using
traditional applications/tools.

It is the data exceeding Terabytes in size.

Because of the variety of data that it encompasses, big data always brings a number of challenges relating
to its volume and complexity.

A recent survey says that 80% of the data created in the world are unstructured.

One challenge is how these unstructured data can be structured, before we attempt to understand and
capture the most important data.

Another challenge is how we can store it.

Here are the top tools used to store and analyse Big Data. We can categorise them into two (storage and
Querying/Analysis).

1. Apache Hadoop

Apache Hadoop is a java based free software framework that can effectively store large amount of data in a
cluster.

This framework runs in parallel on a cluster and has an ability to allow us to process data across all nodes.

Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is the storage system of Hadoop which splits big data and distribute
across many nodes in a cluster.
This also replicates data in a cluster thus providing high availability.

2. Microsoft HDInsight

It is a Big Data solution from Microsoft powered by Apache Hadoop which is available as a service in the
cloud.

HDInsight uses Windows Azure Blob storage as the default file system.

This also provides high availability with low cost.

3. NoSQL

While the traditional SQL can be effectively used to handle large amount of structured data, we need NoSQL
(Not Only SQL) to handle unstructured data.

NoSQL databases store unstructured data with no particular schema.

Each row can have its own set of column values.

NoSQL gives better performance in storing massive amount of data.

There are many open-source NoSQL DBs available to analyse big Data.

4. Hive

This is a distributed data management for Hadoop.

This supports SQL-like query option HiveSQL (HSQL) to access big data.

This can be primarily used for Data mining purpose. This runs on top of Hadoop.

5. Sqoop

This is a tool that connects Hadoop with various relational databases to transfer data. This can be effectively
used to transfer structured data to Hadoop or Hive.

6. PolyBase

This works on top of SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) and is used to access data stored in
PDW.

PDW is a data warhousing appliance built for processing any volume of relational data and provides an
integration with Hadoop allowing us to access non-relational data as well.
7. Big data in EXCEL

As many people are comfortable in doing analysis in EXCEL, a popular tool from Microsoft, you can also
connect data stored in Hadoop using EXCEL 2013.

Hortonworks, which is primarily working in providing Enterprise Apache Hadoop, provides an option to
access big data stored in their Hadoop platform using EXCEL 2013.

You can use Power View feature of EXCEL 2013 to easily summarise the data. (More information).

Similarly, Microsoft’s HDInsight allows us to connect to Big data stored in Azure cloud using a power query
option. (More information).

8. Presto
Facebook has developed and recently open-sourced its Query engine (SQL-on-Hadoop) named Presto which
is built to handle petabytes of data.

Unlike Hive, Presto does not depend on MapReduce technique and can quickly retrieve data.
HR Analytics
 Human Resource analytics (HR Analytics) is defined as the area in the field of
analytics that deals with people analysis and applying analytical process to the
human capital within the organization to improve employee performance and
improving employee retention.

HR analytics doesn’t collect data about how your employees are performing at
work, instead, its sole aim is to provide better insight into each of the human
resource processes, gathering related data and then using this data to make
informed decisions on how to improve these processes.

For example, using HR analytics you can answer the following questions about
the organization’s HR system:

 How high is your employee turnover rate?

 Do you know which of your employees will leave your organization within a year?
 What percentage of employee turnover is regretted loss?

Most human resource professionals will be easily able to answer the first
question for their organization. However, answering the other two questions
will be tricky, especially if you don’t have a detailed data for it.
In order to answer the other two questions, as a professional, you would need
to combine different data and analyze it thoroughly. Human resources tend to
collect a good amount of data but are unaware of how to use this data.

Well, here is the answer! Use it now to analyze your human capital and make
informed decisions. As soon as an organization starts to analyze their people
problems using the collected data, they are engaged in active HR analytics.

5 HR Analytics Every Human Resource Manager Should Know

It goes without saying, that employees are an asset and vital to the success of
any organization. I can say without a doubt, that any business that can attract
the right resources, manage talent acquisition, and utilize their resources to
the optimum is setting a long-term path for success.

Here are the 5 HR analytics every manager must know:

1. Employee Churn Analytics:

Huge investments are involved when it comes to human resources and this
holds true for any business or organization. Employee churn analytics is the
process of assessing your workforce turnover rate.

Employee churn analytics helps predicts the future and reduces employee
churn. Historical employee churn is the data collected from the past and
specifies the employee churn rate since the start of employment.

Predictive and historical churn data both are important for employee churn
analytics.

2. Capability Analytics: Undoubtedly, the success of any business to an

extent depends on the level of expertise of the employees and their skills.

Capability analytics refers to the talent management process that helps you
identify the core competencies of your workforce.
Once you know what those capabilities are, you can set them as a
benchmark and compare them to the capabilities of your workforce and
measure any gaps.

3. Organizational Culture Analytics: Culture is not only notorious to pinpoint

but also, tough to change. It is often the collective unspoken rules, systems,
and patterns of human behavior that make up for the culture of your
organization or business.

Organizational culture analytics is a process of assessing and understanding

better the culture at your workplace. When you know what is the culture of
your organization, you can then evaluate and keep a track of the changes
you might observe. Tracking culture changes helps to understand the early
signs if the culture is getting toxic.
3. Capacity Analytics: It’s true, capacity affects revenue. The aim of capacity
analytics is to establish how operationally efficient is your workforce.

For example, in an organization that specializes in designing clothes, people

are spending too many times on meetings and discussions than spending
that time in more profitable work, or are individuals way too casual about
their tasks?

This behavioral analysis is capacity analytics that determines how much

capacity they as individuals have to grow.

4. Leadership Analytics: Poor leadership is as good as no leadership at all.

Poor leadership costs money, time and employee churn.

Employee retention for such an organization becomes extremely difficult and

prevents a business to perform at its full potential.
Leadership analytics analyzes and unpacks various aspects of leadership
performance at a workplace to uncover the good, bad and the ugly!

Data can be collected through qualitative research and quantitative

research by using a mix of both methods like surveys, polls, focus groups or
ethnographic research.
HR Analytics Example

To get started with HR analytics, a human resource manager needs to map

and collect all the relevant data. For example, consider hypothetically, you
want to measure the impact of employee engagement on the financial
performance of the organization.

You will need employee engagement data and your organization’s financial
performance data to draw inferences based on these statistical inputs.

As an organization make sure to deploy an employee engagement

survey once every year.

This will help you collect the most recent data on how engaged your
employees are at the workplace.

Key working areas can be analyzed based on the output of this collective
data. Imagine what you can do with this kind of data! It is almost impossible
to side look when you have a treasure of data that can help you make future
predictions accurately.
And this just doesn’t stop here, you can make predictions in different
performing and non-performing areas of your organization.

Whether it is to draw an inference for budget allocation for employee training

or predict which new employee will become the best performer. The range is
wide!
HR Metrics Dashboard

The HR Metrics dashboard is an important part of Human Resource planning

and strategy. It is a tool that forms the basis of informed decision making
within the organization, specifically for the Human Resources department
and other stakeholders. Before we dig any deeper let’s cover the basics first.
Here are the top 3 functions of an HR dashboard:

1. To monitor human capital: Regular reporting enables HR to keep a track of

the activities that are going on in the organization and amongst the
employees by tracking the key workforce metrics. New trends can be
anticipated and emerging problems can be addressed before they negatively
impact the business.

2. Help HR perform better: An HR metric dashboard helps managers perform

better at their workplace. The report can inform managers about any
significant changes or development within the teams. For example, consider
that the accounting department struggles with high employee turnover,
managers will be more likely to put emphasis on employee retention and
keep in mind the risks time taken to replace an employee if he/she quits.
 3. Tackle problem areas: The metrics dashboard also offers a great way to
tackle problem areas with greater transparency. In an organization HR will pay
greater attention if the system is transparent and known to all, the HR metrics
dashboard helps regulate this transparency since the reputation of the HR will
be on line.

At QuestionPro we understand the importance of reporting and Tracking. We

offer our customers and clients the next generation workforce analytics.
QuestionPro Workforce offers HR Dashboard that is a one-stop solution to all
your HR issues. You can track:

 Employee activities
 Submit Feedback
 Managers can perform and submit reviews
 And much more
Predictive HR Analytics Trends- 2018

1. Don’t go over the top with your surveys

One very important aspect of human resources is to know where to draw the
line. Why send out a survey only once or twice a year, when you can send it
anytime. But wait, do your employees really want to keep filling out surveys a
day in and day out. I predict this approach won’t last long, especially if only
limited action is taken even after collecting this amount of data.

Continuous listening cannot last for long. Employees will start getting irritable
and filling out the survey will become a mere formality than giving honest
feedback. In addition, the data obtained will be diluted and irrelevant.

2. Collect data only if you are planning on using it

It’s the age of technology and you can get carried away, send all those surveys
and collect rich data and then get totally confused about what you are going to
do with all that data. When employees give their feedback they expect to see
the results. If results are not visible they will stop giving you honest feedback.
Make sure to use your data at the right time for the right reasons.
3. Technology: Boon or a Bane?

HR analytics majorly revolves around studying people. Technology is the

necessity of time, but let’s be completely honest, is it the right time to force it
into a behavioral analysis. Machine learning and Artificial intelligence are
drastically impacting day-to-day operations, so my first impression of it is, it’s a
hype.

The complexity of technology makes it a barrier in the field of human capital.

The first hurdle is purely predicting human behavior, letting a computer take
these decisions has “DANGER” written all over it. You cannot put everyone in
your organization in one bucket. You cannot generalize your workforce and if
you are willing to do that let me warn you of the blunders you are about to
commit.

Although this might tempt you, surely it’s too early to computerize humans, is it
even appropriate?
 Benefits of HR Analytics

HR Analytics helps your organization become more strategic, data helps you tackle
current issues and also plan better for future activities. Let’s look at some of the benefits
that HR HR Analytics offers:

 Improve your hiring process

Talent acquisition is a key element of your HR process, it is an all-year-round activity. Be it
hiring for a new function, a larger team, or a new role altogether, your TA team is always
busy. Finding the right candidate is always a task, and when they do, one can only hope
everything goes well and they actually join the organization. How many candidates
actually join, how many drop-off at what stage? What job boards work the best for you?
How many candidates do you need to reach out to close a position? These are just some
questions that you could look at resolving through analytics. This data will help you see
the bigger picture and fill in whatever gaps that are causing delays.

 Reduce attrition
Employee retention is becoming harder every day, especially with the younger workforce
not afraid of switching jobs frequently. Conduct exit interviews, gather data, look at the
reasons, patterns and find a way to arrest the attrition rate. HR Analytics here will go a
 long way in identifying what are the factors contributing to attrition and what remedial
measures can be taken to avoid it in the future.

 Improve employee experience

It is imperative for managers and HR reps to meet with employees regularly to understand
what factors are affecting employee experiences in positive and negative ways. This is a
crucial step in improving employee experience. Many organizations fail to realize that
employee experience starts at hiring. Your first interaction with a candidate before hiring
is equally important to any other HR-related process. Employee experience is the sum of
experiences that an employee feels throughout their journey. Every step, every behavior,
and every experience counts.

 Make your workforce productive

Productivity levels will always go up and down and there are a host of factors affecting
that. This ranges from office infrastructure, work environment, managers and team-mates,
and job satisfaction among other things. Gathering data on what’s affecting productivity
will certain arm you with data to take corrective actions. Employee engagement is a key
factor affecting workforce productivity, look at improving engagement. You can start off
by implementing a few employee engagement ideas and activities to boost the rate.
 Improve your talent processes
Talent processes are not only about pre-hiring, hiring or annual performance reviews, but
they are also much more than that. You need to consider training, recreational activities,
and counseling among others. While each organization is unique, there are some
processes that should be standard, these can be regular one-on-ones, skip-level meetings,
etc. HR should always be monitoring their talent processes, identify challenges and
bottlenecks if any, and then work on them. It’s ideal to meet with employees, however, we
understand this may not always be possible or feasible. Conducting employee surveys is a
good idea, get their feedback and inputs and work on them, let them know they are being
heard. Employee surveys don’t always have to only be exit surveys, do it to see what they
feel about employee benefits, how employee experience is at your organization, what
changes they would like to see for improving it, etc.

 Gain employee trust

Thanks to HR Analytics, you have access to data that lets you see what’s happening in the
organization and how employees are perceiving it. When you are armed with data, it lets
you fix what’s supposedly broken and improve future processes. You can clearly see
what’s working and what’s not. When you bring about changes to processes to make them
better and introduce new ones, your employees take notice. They know their feedback is
valued and the management team will act on it. This is crucial to build and maintain
employee trust, a critical element to high employee engagement, employee success, and
employee retention percentages.
HR Analytics does not mean buying expensive software, setting up a huge team or long
processes. You can start small – have conversations with employees, record their
responses, add managers in the loop, involve various functions, make a plan, share it with
everybody, and commit to it. Sharing the data is crucial to make sure everyone knows it,
understands it, and suggest ideas to improve the employee experience. Use the data to
drive initiatives, remedy any existing problems, and bring positive changes in the
organization. HR Analytics will help you monitor and improve your employee engagement,
employee retention, employee wellness, employee productivity, employee experience,
and work culture.

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How HR analytics helps Human Resource
Management
Like marketing analytics has revolutionized the field of marketing, HR analytics is changing HR. It enables HR to:

 Make better decisions using data

 Create a business case for HR interventions
 Test the effectiveness of these interventions
 Move from an operational partner to a tactical, or even strategic partner
Today, the majority of HR departments focus on reporting employee data. This doesn’t suffice in today’s data-driven economy.
Just keeping records is often insufficient to add strategic value. In the words of Carly Fiorina: “The goal is to turn data into information and
information into insight”. This also applies to HR.
Doing this enables HR to become more involved in decision-making on a strategic level. The picture below shows how this works in practice.
A few examples of People Analytics
To get started with people analytics, you need to combine data from different HR systems. Say you want to measure the impact of employee
engagement on financial performance. To measure this relationship, you need to combine your annual engagement survey with your
performance data. This way you can calculate the impact of engagement on the financial performance of different stores and departments.

Key HR areas will change based on the insights gained from HR analytics. Functions like recruitment, performance management, and learning &
development will change.

Imagine that you can calculate the business impact of your learning and development budget! Or imagine that you can predict which new hires
will become your highest performers in two years. Or that you can predict which new hires will leave your company in the first year. Having this
information will change your hiring & selection procedures and decisions.

If you want to read more about how data can change hiring practices, check out Laszlo Bock’s book ‘Work Rules’. Laszlo Bock was the senior
VP of People Operations at Google. In his book, he describes how hiring practices changed at Google after they started to analyze their
recruitment data.
We’ve published some very practical case studies in the past that show a step-by-step approach to analytics. Three of them I’d recommend, are:

 Case Study 1: Key Drivers of Retail Sales Performance

 Case Study 2: Reducing Workplace Accidents Using People Analytics
 Case Study 3: How we Determined Optimal Staffing Levels

How to get started with people analytics

Organizations usually start by asking simple questions. An example is: “Which employees are my high potentials?” You can answer this
question using quite simple statistics. Doing this helps to quantify the relationships between people’s abilities and organizational outcomes. This
way analytics helps companies track absenteeism, turnover, burnout, performance and much more.

An even better way to get started is following a professional course in HR analytics. In the HR analytics academy, we offer three courses.
  The HR analytics lead course. This course is for people who are heading an analytics department and teaches all the skills and tools needed to do
this successfully.
 The HR Analyst course. This course is for HR professionals who want to learn how to work with HR data using simple tools like Excel and PowerBI.
 The strategic HR metrics course. Metrics are a starting point for analytics. If you think you’re not ready for analytics because you’re not yet working
with the right metrics, this is the course for you.
Analytics makes HR (even more) exciting. Its insights are input for strategic decisions and optimize day-to-day business processes.

In addition, if you know what makes your employees tick, you can create a better work environment and identify future leaders. Imagine that
you can predict which employees are most likely to leave the company. This information helps your succession management and benefits
strategic workforce planning. A notable example of a company doing this is Credit Suisse.
After asking the right question, you have to select data from your different systems. This data is then combined, cleaned and analyzed. This
analysis leads to insights.
Not all insights are equally interesting. That’s why you should ask questions about things you can change. For example, you can’t change an
employee’s gender. However, you do have influence over your management styles and engagement levels. Asking the right questions leads to
actionable insights.

How does People Analytics shape the business?

You can imagine that HR analytics holds enormous value for an organization. These examples are only the beginning. Indeed, analytics enables
companies to measure the business impact of people policies.

By applying complex statistical analyses, HR can predict the future of the workforce. This enables managers to measure the financial impact of
Human Resource practices. To read more about the tools used for these analyses, check our overview on the top HR analytics tools.
Measuring the impact of HR on bottom line performance is the “holy grail” of HR analytics (Lawler III, Levenson & Boudreau, 2004). This is
often done by calculating a Return on Investment (ROI). It is the most powerful way for HR to increase its strategic influence.
Aforementioned examples have an impact on both the cost and the revenue side of the business.
Knowing the impact of HR policies will also help HR to become a strategic partner and get rid of its ‘soft’ image. It helps HR to align its
strategy with business goals and to quantify the value it adds to the business. It takes the guess-work out of HR.
So, how do we at Analytics in HR define HR analytics? We think it is about identifying the people-related drivers of business performance. It

takes the guesswork out of employee management and is, therefore, the future of HR. Or, to put it in the words of Edwards ONLINE
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 UNIT 3-
Retail Analytics
What is Retail Business

Retail is the process of selling consumer goods or services to customers through

multiple channels of distribution to earn a profit.

Retailers satisfy demand identified through a supply chain.

The term "retailer" is typically applied where a service provider

fills the small orders of a large number of individuals,
who are end-users, rather than large orders of a small number of
wholesale, corporate or government clientele.

Shopping generally refers to the act of buying products.

Sometimes this is done to obtain final goods, including necessities such as food and clothing;
sometimes it takes place as a recreational activity.

Recreational shopping often involves window shopping and browsing: it does not always
result in a purchase.

Most modern retailers typically make a variety of strategic level decisions including
The type of store,
The market to be served,
The optimal product assortment,
Customer service,
Supporting services
and the store's overall market positioning.
Once the strategic retail plan is in place, retailers devise the retail mix which includes product,
price, place, promotion, personnel and presentation.

In the digital age, an increasing number of retailers are seeking to reach broader markets by
selling through multiple channels, including both bricks and mortarand online retailing.

Digital technologies are also changing the way that consumers pay for goods and services.

Retailing support services may also include the provision of credit, delivery services, advisory
services, stylist services and a range of other supporting services.

Retail shops occur in a diverse range of types and in many different contexts – from strip
shopping centres in residential streets through to large, indoor shopping malls.

Shopping streets may restrict traffic to pedestrians only. Sometimes a shopping street has a
partial or full roofto create a more comfortable shopping environment – protecting customers
from various types of weather conditions such as extreme temperatures, winds or precipitation.
Retail service providers include retail banking, tourism, insurance,
private healthcare, private education, private security firms,
legal firms, publishers, public transport and others.

For example, a tourism provider might have a retail division that books travel and
accommodation for consumers plus a wholesale division that purchases blocks of
accommodation, hospitality, transport and sightseeing which are subsequently packaged into a
holiday tour for sale to retail travel agents.

Some retailers badge their stores as "wholesale outlets" offering "wholesale prices."
WHAT IS RETAIL ANALYTICS?
Retail analytics is the process of providing analytical data on
 inventory levels
 supply chain movement and supplier
 consumer demand
 Sales Amount/Invoice
 that are crucial for making marketing and
 procurement decisions.

The analytics on demand and supply data can be used for maintaining
procurement level and also for taking marketing decisions.

Retail analytics gives us detailed customer insights along with insights

into the business and processes of the organisation with scope and
need for improvement.
Retail analytics is any information that allows
retailers to make smarter decisions and manage their businesses more effectively.

Retail analytics can identify your best customers and where they live,
and predict future spending in terms of amounts, categories, and even brands.

The company then applies a layer of predictive retail analytics to the

response data, producing a view of consumer behavior,
which retailers can use to sense product demand.
Data Analytics in Retail Industry
For big retail players all over the world, data analytics is applied more these days at all stages of the retail process – taking track of
popular products that are emerging, doing forecasts of sales and future demand via predictive simulation, optimizing placements of
products and offers through heat-mapping of customers and many others. With this, identifying customers who would likely be
interested in certain products depending on their past purchases, finding the most suitable way to handle them via targeted
marketing strategies and then coming up with what to sell next is what data analytics deals with.

Any small retailer in the business of selling knows that

attracting new customers,

retaining existing ones and

selling more are crucial to achieving the holy grail of business—long-term profitability.

Given the rapid change of pace and competition in the retail landscape, it’s no longer enough to just open a
store and expect profits to roll in.

Retailers need to be firing on all cylinders. This means knowing who their customers are, what they want and
most important of all, offering them the right products and services at the right prices and right time.

In order to do that, retailers need to be able to understand their customers at the deepest level in order to
turn those insights into sales and profitability.
Yet, if our research is any indication, it appears that a majority of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are in
the dark about who their customers are, much less what they are looking for.

Retail analytics focuses on providing insights related to sales, inventory, customers, and other important
aspects crucial for merchants’ decision-making process.

The discipline encompasses several granular fields to create a broad picture of a retail business’ health, and
sales alongside overall areas for improvement and reinforcement.

Essentially, retail analytics is used to help make better choices, run businesses more efficiently, and deliver
improved customer service analytics.

The field of retail analysis goes beyond superficial data analysis, using techniques like data mining and data
discovery to sanitize datasets to produce actionable BI insights that can be applied in the short-term.

Moreover, companies use these analytics to create better snapshots of their target demographics. By
harnessing sales data analysis, retailers can identify their ideal customers according to diverse categories
such as age, preferences, buying patterns, location, and more.
Strategic Areas in Data Analytics for Retailers

There are some strategic areas where retail players identify a ready use as far as it is data analytics. Here are a few of
those areas:

1) Price Optimization

Of course, data analytics plays a very important role in price determination. Algorithms perform several functions like tracking
demand, inventory levels and activities of competitors, and respond automatically to market challenges in real time, which make
actions to be taken depending on insights safe manner.

Price optimization helps to determine when prices are to be dropped which is popularly known as ‘mark down optimization.’

Before analytics was used, retailers would just bring down prices after a buying season ends for a certain product line, when the
demand is diminishing.

Meanwhile, analytics shows that a gradual price reduction from when demand starts sagging would lead to increase in revenues.

The US retail Stage Stores found this out by performing some experiments and was backed by a predictive approach for
determining the rise and fall of demand for a certain product which beats the conventional end of season sale.

Retail giants like Walmart, spend millions merchandising systems on their real time with the aim of building the world’s largest
private cloud so as to track millions of transactions as they happen daily.

As stated earlier, algorithms perform this function and others.

2.) Future performance prediction

This is another important area when looking into data analytics in retail industry since every customer interaction has a very big
impact on both potential and existing relationships.

Dishing out the full idea to the full sales force personnel might be risky because making a wrong decision could result in an
immediate or prolonged loss.

Rather, top business organizations have discovered the best way to contain cause-and–effect relationship between key
performance and strategic shift indicators by using a test-and-learn approach.

This is carried out by customers or reps who compare the performance of the test group to performance of a well-matched control
group. This is the data science involved behind the study.

3.) To accommodate small-scale retailers

Data analytics in retail is important for small-scale retailers, who can get assistance from platforms who provide the services.

Apart from this, there are organizations, mainly start-ups, who offer social analytics to create the awareness of products on social
media. Therefore, small-scale businesses can take the advantage of data analytics retail without spending too much in order to
avoid hurting their finances.
4.) Demand prediction

The moment retailers get a real understanding of customers buying trends, the focus on areas that would have high demand. It
involves gathering seasonal, demographical, occasions led data and economic indicators so as to create a good image of purchase
behavior across target market. This is very good for inventory management.

5.) Pick out the highest Return on Investment (ROI) Opportunities

Retailers use data-driven intelligence and predictive risk filters after having a good understanding of their potential and existing
customer base, for modeling expected responses for marketing campaigns, depending on how they are measured by a propensity
to buy or likely buy.
6.) Forecasting trends

Retailers, nowadays have several advanced tools at their disposal to have an understanding of the current trends. Algorithms that
forecast trends go via the buying data to analyze what needs to be promoted by marketing departments and what is not needed to
be promoted.

7.) Identifying customers

This is also important in data analytics retail because choosing which customers would likely desire a certain product, data
analytics is the best way to go about it.

Because of this, most retailers rely so much on recommendation engine technology online, data gotten via transactional records
and loyalty programs online and offline.

Companies like Amazon might not be ready ship products straight to the customer’s before they order; they are looking in that
direction.

Individual geographic areas depend on demographics that they have on their customers which imply that demand is forecast.
Therefore, it means that when they get orders, they are able to fulfill them more efficiently and quickly while data gotten depicted
how customers make contact with retailers is used for deciding which would be the best path in getting their attention on a certain

product or promotion.
Role of Data Analytics in Retail Industry

Other key areas where data analytics play a key role are:

a.) Discount Efficiency

Almost 95% of shoppers have admitted that they use a coupon code when they do shopping.

For retailers to gain from offers, they need to first ask themselves how valuable such deal would be their business.

Such promotional deals definitely will get customers rush in but might not be an effective strategy to sustain a long-term customer
loyalty.

Rather, retailers can run analysis on historical data and utilize it in predictive modeling for determining the impact such offers would
have on a long-term basis.

For instance, a team of data analysts and scientists can make a history of events that might have occurred if there was no discount.

They then make a comparison of this with the real events when there were discounts to have a better understanding of the
effectiveness of each discount.

After getting this knowledge, the retailer will now readjust his discount strategy by increasing the number of discounts on various
categories and removing less profitable deals. This would certainly boost the average monthly revenue.
b.) Churn Rate Reduction

The creation of customer loyalty is the main priority among all brands because the cost of attracting a new customer is more than
six times expensive than retaining the existing ones.

It is possible to represent churn rate in various like percent of customers lost, the number of customers lost, percent of recurring
value lost and value of recurring business lost.

With the help of big data analytics, insights got like things customers are likely to churn, retailers can find it easy in determining the
best way to alter their overall subscriptions to prevent such scenarios.

For instance, a retailer takes an analysis of customer data after a monthly subscription box and can use it to get new subscribers
who might likely end up as long term customers.

This would result to the retailer decreasing the monthly churn significantly and would make brands be able to calculate lifetime
value and make money back on marketing costs that are steep.

c.) Product Sell-through rate

Products that are data related can be analyzed by retailers to find what pricing, visuals, and terminology will resonate with the
potential and existing customers. An alteration of the product showcase depending on the data sets that are analyzed, retailers will
obtain improved sales rate. Take, for instance, Uber’s whole business model depends on big analytics for sourcing of crowd and
sell-through of products. With customers’ personal data, Uber is able to match them with the most suitable drivers depending on the
location and rating of their customers. Customers, therefore because of such personalized experience, would prefer to take
advantage of Uber’s personalized offers against offers by competitors of Uber or even regular taxis.

Getting the right customers to stores is very important too, something a US department store giant recently discovered. Because of
the way their analytics showed a dearth in vital “millennials” demographic groups, their One Below basement was opened at their
New York flagship store. Promotions such as “selfie walls” and while-you-wait customized 3D-printed smartphone cases were
offered. All these were just ideas for attracting young customers to their store with the aim of giving them an awesome experience.
What Can I Use Retail Analytics For?

There are several excellent retail analytics examples that are relevant to a variety of companies.
One of the biggest benefits the field delivers to companies is optimizing their inventory and
procurement.

Thanks to predictive tools, businesses can use historical data and trend analysis to determine
which products they should order, and in what quantities instead of relying exclusively on past
orders.

In addition, they can optimize inventory management to emphasize products customers need,
reducing wasted space and associated overhead costs.
See it in action:

Explore Dashboard

Apart from inventory activities, many retailers use analytics to identify customer trends and
changing preferences by combining data from different areas.

By merging sales data with a variety of factors, businesses can identify emerging trends and
anticipate them better.

This is closely tied to marketing functions, which also benefit from analytics.
Explore Dashboard
Companies can harness retail analytics to improve their marketing campaigns by building an improved
understanding of individual preferences and gleaning more granular insights.

By blending demographic data with information such as shopping habits, preferences, and purchase history,
companies can create strategies that focus on individuals and exhibit higher success rates.

===========================

How to Use Retail Analytics to Win Sales: 3 Real-Life Examples

Baublebar: Introducing On-Trend Designs From Data-Informed Insights

Marconi’s Beach Outfitters: Positioning Best-Selling Products Increases Customer Loyalty

Zookies Cookies: Tapping Into Nationwide Pet Insurance’s Base

Next Steps and Recommendations

1 Baublebar: Introducing On-Trend Designs From Data-Informed Insights

Founders Daniella Yacobovsky (left) and Amy Jain of Baublebar (Source)

 About the company: Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky launched Baublebar in 2011 to provide trendy and
affordable jewelry via e-commerce at a “fast fashion” pace. The company set up its first brick-and-mortar
store in New York only a year after its launch.

The customer data it analyzes: Using its internally-built software, Baublebar’s marketing team drills down
into the following customer metrics, and more:

 Age
 Geography
 Color preferences
 What customers are buying, as well as what products they have no interest in

By closely tracking these metrics, Baublebar can better understand what styles are resonating on the ground.

Social media also serves as a valuable resource for customer data. The company keeps a constant eye on
what customers are sharing and talking about with their friends.

According to its founders, “The biggest driver of our success to date is our attention to our customer. We
listen to her any way she talks to us, passively, or actively. We pay attention to how she is shopping our site
and what she’s looking for.”

What it discovered: Rapidly changing trends means customers are always on the hunt for the next new
thing. By wedding its data-driven insights with social media and customer conversations, Baublebar is able to
accurately predict upcoming fashions and account for those trends in its designs.

This gives the company a significant leg up over competitors by providing unique offerings that are highly
likely to reflect what customers want.

Another way Baublebar has been able to understand its customers is through its customer service
and stylist team. In talking to customers through the phone or video chats, the team is able to get

crucial firsthand knowledge of what customers are after.

“Your customer’s talking to you constantly—where she’s clicking, what she’s engaging with, what she’s
sharing—and as long as you’re paying really close attention, it allows you to build faster,” says Jain.

The results it achieved: Once a trend is targeted, the company can design and manufacture a new
jewellery piece in only a week.

Baublebar’s compact supply chain—from the creation of a new piece of jewelry to shipping the finished
product to a customer—takes as little as four weeks.
Baublebar’s “Buried Bauble” email campaign (Source)
One of its most successful implementations of customer data has been its “Buried Bauble” program. The
program has a two-pronged goal: first to engage customers and second, to drive repeat visits to its site.

Every Monday and Friday, Baublebar marks the price of an item down between $10 and $20 and “hides” it on
its website. It then sends a promotional email alerting customers with a clue to find the product.

“It got people through the door and excited about our products and is one of our many engagement efforts,”
says Jain. The result? Ten percent of its customers participated in the promo. These customers also have a 20
percent higher lifetime order value than those who did not take part in the program.

=======================================
Marconi’s Beach Outfitters:
Positioning Best-Selling Products Increases Customer Loyalty
 Marconi’s founder Kyle Baptist, on the right (Source)

About the company: Founded in the Cape Cod town of Wellfleet in 2007 by the Baptist family, Marconi’s
Beach Outfitters sells all things beach and resort-related—from pool floats and apparel to milkshakes and
fudge.

The customer data it analyzes: By looking at its customers’ demographic and price points using Vend
POS, Marconi’s Beach Outfitters discovered a few key insights.

First, it identified its core customer base as young families with children. Next, it looked into the average
spend to gauge what customers were comfortable spending. “This allows us to know what price points will
work in our store,” says Kyle Baptist, CEO of the beach and water sports outfitter store.

What it discovered: From its POS system, Baptist was also able to see what its best-selling products were.
Its homemade fudge emerged as one of the store’s top grossing products.

“We always knew it was popular, but our POS allowed us to see just how much we were selling and that
customers were coming back more than once during their vacation,” says Baptist. “With this information, we
realized we wanted to create more of a brand around our fudge business.”
 A social media promotion for Marconi’s Beach Outfitters’ Unicorn Fudge (Source)

The results it achieved: Armed with insight into its top-selling products, Marconi’s Beach Outfitters
launched an email and social media campaign focused on one of its top-selling fudges, the “Unicorn Fudge.”

On top of that, it also created an in-store concept called “Wellfleet Fudge Factor” alongside another marketing
campaign targeted at the community of locals and tourists in Wellfleet, Cape Cod.

“We did a basic grassroots campaign posting signs and banners in heavily trafficked areas around town.
Whenever anyone sees our sign, they’ll say, ‘We hear you have the best fudge on the Cape!'” says Baptist.
Samples are then handed out which “always turns into sales” for the store.

Being located in a tourist town, Marconi’s has to deal with seasonal challenges. Customers come and go, and
it can be difficult to get them to come back a year or more down the line.

The launch of its “Wellfleet Fudge Factor” marketing campaign has enabled Marconi’s to focus on its best
products and build a following as a result.

“We have customers who love our fudge so much that they call us when they get home from vacation to see
if we can ship them the fudge,” says Baptist. “We even have people come in the first day of their week-long
vacations to request flavors that they’ve been craving,” he adds.

Since the launch of the marketing campaign, Marconi’s Beach Outfitters has seen a 20 percent increase in
sales.

Zookies Cookies: Tapping Into Nationwide Pet Insurance’s Base

 Zookies Cookies partners with Nationwide Pet Insurance on email and social marketing (Source)

About the company: Zookies Cookies sells flavored mixes for dog cookies, ranging from Peanut Barker and
Pupkin Pie to Cocomutt and Begnog. Its mixes are available both online and in store.

The customer data it analyzes: Zookies Cookies uses Shopify and Google Analytics to get a better
understanding of its dog-loving customer base. The company analyzes basic demographic information such
as:

 Who its customer base is

 Customers’ past purchase activity
 Geographical information
 The number of returning customers
 How many times a potential customer visits its online store before making a purchase

“One thing in particular that’s been helpful for our growth is learning how many folks purchase as gifts,
instead of for their own pets. That’s really helped us shape our retail strategy as well,” adds Tom Simon, its
chief marketing officer.

The results it achieved: Using Shopify, Zookies Cookies was able to learn more about the flavors its
customers were interested in. “That was a big help for us in early production to make sure we weren’t
overdoing it on flavors that tended to move a little slower,” says Simon.

Additionally, Zookies found out that most of its customers are existing customers of Nationwide Pet
Insurance. “As a result, we’ve been able to run campaigns with discounts targeted specifically to their
customer base and have seen strong sales as a result. Their customers trust Nationwide, which helps drive
value to our products as well,” says Simon.

Recommendations and Next Steps

Digging deep into customer data can give you a big-picture view of who your best customers are and how you
can harness that loyalty through marketing campaigns. Here are some recommendations for how you can do
the same:

 Collect basic customer data—and then some: If you already have a POS system, make sure to collect the basics, such as name,
contact details and age. As Baublebar demonstrates, the more intel you collect, the more you know about your customer, the more
targeted your promotions can be. That way, you’ll be able to reach these customers with a variety of focused marketing campaigns
to lift sales.
 Identify your best-sellers and promote them: After identifying that its homemade fudge was a top-seller, Marconi’s capitalized
on its success with an email and social media campaign. The result? A 20 percent increase in sales. Make analytics work for you by
using it to inform what product you should be pushing in your next campaign.

Here are some next steps you can take to start acquiring that data:

 Don’t have a POS system? You can check out user reviews of popular retail POS software on our site. Or you can answer a few
questions and speak with one of our expert retail advisors, who will provide free advice on what’s the best fit for your business.
 Data means nothing if you don’t apply it: Retailers can learn a lot about their customers just by looking at the data within their
POS systems.

Whether you already have a POS or are looking for one, be sure to thoroughly explore its features and set up
a chat with your vendor to learn about what metrics you can track and how you can do it.

Knowing your customer and drawing the right conclusions to implement an effective marketing campaign can
make all the difference between success and failure.