Analytics For Key Functions Across Organisation

Objective of Service

Analytics is analyzing the data generated by a business enterprise for improving business. If your calculator could store and report data for a year, you would know what kind of numbers you have been around with for a year. In business, this data is stored and extracted from the business IT systems and then analysed to bring out meaningful insights. Analytics helps businesses with improved decision-making, achieve enhanced efficiency, build a more controlled environment, and become more agile as a business enterprise. Sometimes it is also referred to as data analytics or business analytics.
Through this service program, DFX offers analytics advisory and consulting services aimed at helping our clients identify their unique analytics requirements and find the best solutions.
Is data analytics meant only for big businesses? What about data analytics for small business owners? We always maintain that analytics for small and medium businesses is as important as it is for any business giant.

Importance of Analytics

• What is analytics? (Or what is data analytics?) If you could know that between 7 PM and 9 PM your departmental store registers 50% of the daily sales, you would definitely put more focus on those two hours to serve better. Or say, you could further determine that certain categories of products sell more during those hours; you will further sharpen your focus on those product categories. Going further, it may also be possible to determine the impact of discounted pricing on the demand for these products. Parallel assessments may also reveal the performance of advertised brands versus the rest. These critical revelations are possible with analytics. Basically, analytics is analyzing the data generated by a business enterprise for improving business. Given the technical nature of the tools and technologies involved, many businessmen turn to data analytics consulting firms. Data consulting or data analytics consulting services has grown leaps and bounds in recent years to help countless startups and SMEs gain from this technological edge.
• Analytics leads to improved decision-making in all functions. Analytics can be used in all the functional areas of a business enterprise for improved decision-making. We assessed the importance of analytics in marketing in the previous section through some examples. In HR, analytics can be used to study the performances of employees, teams, departments and the organization as a whole. For example, it can reveal the correlation between employee performance and having specialized training in the concerned field. In inventory management, analytics can provide insights to demand patterns based on purchases being made over a given period. Similarly, analytics applies to all functional areas of business and can lead to improved decision-making.
• Analytics leads to achieving higher efficiency with business operations. Analytics can not only lead to external improvements, but it can also be used for introspection of the internal functioning. Using the example used earlier, if HR analytics can reveal that there is a positive correlation between employees’ performance and them having specialized training, it also establishes that having the right training makes a difference in the productivity of the employees. Now, this insight can be used in recruitment and training programs so that there are more productive employees for more efficient execution of business operations.
  Analytics leads to a more controlled environment (organization and operation wise). Once you have the right analytics tools at your disposal, it becomes extremely convenient to keep a tab on the trends and direction of where your business is heading as an organization and in terms of operations. With the right SOP-IT integration, analytics could reveal the degree of compliance in following the established policies and procedures in your organization. You can have a set of predefined standards to help you decide when you must intervene to set things back on track.
• Analytics helps a business become agile. With analytics in action, a business enterprise remains capable of assessing and analyzing its performance at any time it wants. With data being generated all the time that can be accessed real-time and processed as sooner, businesses can keep a vigil eye on the vital parameters of performance and operations, both internal and external. With such might of analytics at its disposal, businesses are more likely to foresee opportunities and threats/bottlenecks. This gives them the time to alter their strategies and positioning and thereby grant agility to their enterprise.

How Analytics is helping organisations?

• More accuracy with purchasing decisions: No business should be purchasing and stocking inventory more than their optimized requirement levels. Otherwise, it will lead to higher carrying cost and eventually, more cost per product sold. Also, unnecessary investments will be stuck in inventory. To avoid these circumstances, businesses use analytics to establish and predict the demand pattern based on the demand statistics of the recent past against factors like product categories and sizes, time of the year, brands, etc. However, one has to bear in mind that internal demand analytics is not foolproof and that other external factors like competition, suppliers, regulations, etc. also need to be taken into consideration. But the internal analytics provide the foundation to make considerations for the external influences.
• Better utilization of space and logistics: With analytics, businesses get more precise with their inventory purchasing decisions which give them close estimates of the inventory they will have to handle at different given points in time. This helps them better define their spatial requirements for warehousing and store merchandising. They can also map their logistical requirements for the year and allocate their budgets and do the bulk bookings accordingly which in turn makes them more accurate with their budgeting and also attract discounts for early and bulk booking from their logistical partners.
• Better understanding of customer behaviour: Gaining meaningful insights into customer behaviour has probably been the best use of analytics. Jeff Bezos was asked in an interview about his idea behind starting Amazon, and he said that internet usage at that time was growing at 2300%. The rest is history. There was probably no analytics then as we know it now. But such is the nature of what analytics is capable of revealing. However, such high- impact insights are the rarest of the rare and analytics alone is not much without business acumen and vision. Nevertheless, data analytics is crucial to map customer behaviour and for those who are new to data analytics, they can always take the help of customer analytics consulting for the leads.
• Better HR and performance management: Having the right workforce all the time is critical for every business. Is hiring the right people and paying them competitively enough? Ok, add a positive working environment. Analytics will help you go beyond these standard, universal, fit-for-all solutions. It will help you pinpoint the critical areas where the employees are not performing as well as they are in the other areas. It will help you identify the areas of training and development. This could also lead to identifying flaws in your established policies and procedures. If retention is increasing in your organization, analytics could reveal if there are any internal reasons. Say, if most of the retention is taking place in the sales department, you should look into that department.
• Improved digital marketing: With digital marketing becoming commonplace for almost every business, it becomes as important to measure its performance against the investments made into it. Analytics helps businesses assess the flow of traffic to their websites/apps, the location wise response of the digital audience, the nature of user engagement, rate of conversion, etc. This information reveals whether the digital marketing efforts are good enough to attract visitors, engage the users so that they spend more time on the pages, and that they actually move to the conversion objectives.

Why DFX for Analytics Advisory?

With over eight years of experience, the expert team of professionals at DFX provides data analytics advisory and consulting services to its esteemed clients. From assessment to recommendations, we follow a planned, proven, and systematic approach in delivering our data analytics advisory services maintaining the best standards. We strive to deliver high-quality insights and stick to actionable reporting.
If you have any question on how analytics can help your business, drop us a message, and we shall be happy to reach out to you.