BUSINESS ANALYTICS

Dr. Anand Sharma

WHAT IS BUSINESS ANALYTICS?

Business analytics (BA) is the combination of

skills, technologies, and practices used to
examine an organization's data and
performance as a way to gain insights and
make data-driven decisions in the future
using statistical analysis.
The goal of BA is to narrow down which
datasets are useful and which can increase
revenue, productivity, and efficiency.
ESSENTIALS OF BUSINESS
ANALYTICS
Business analytics has many use cases, but when it comes to
commercial organizations, BA is typically used to:
 Analyze data from a variety of sources. This could be anything
from cloud applications to marketing automation tools and CRM
software. 
 Use advanced analytics and statistics to find patterns within
datasets. These patterns can help you predict trends in the
future and access new insights about the consumer and their
behavior. 
 Monitor KPIs and trends as they change in real-time. This makes
it easy for businesses to not only have their data in one place
but to also come to conclusions quickly and accurately. 
 Support decisions based on the most current information. With
BA providing such a vast amount of data that you can use to
back up your decisions, you can be sure that you are fully
informed for not one, but several different scenarios.
TYPES OF BUSINESS ANALYTICS
TECHNIQUES
 Descriptive analytics: Interpretation of
historical data and KPIs to identify trends and
patterns. This allows for a big picture look of
what happened in the past and what is
happening currently using data aggregation
and data mining techniques.
 Diagnostic analytics: Focuses on past
performance to determine which elements
influence specific trends.
This is done using drill-down, data
discovering, data mining, and correlation to
reveal the cause of specific events
 Predictive analytics: Uses statistics to forecast and assess
future outcomes using statistical models and machine learning
techniques. This often takes the results of descriptive analytics
to create models that determine the likelihood of specific
outcomes.

Used by sales and marketing teams to forecast opinions of

specific customers based on social media data.
 Prescriptive analytics: Uses past performance data to
recommend how to handle similar situations in the future. Not
only does this type of business analytics determine outcomes,
but it can also recommend the specific actions that need to
occur to have the best possible result. This is often achieved
using deep learning and complex neural networks.

Used to match various options to real-time needs of a consumer.

ELEMENTS OF BUSINESS
ANALYTICS
Data mining
 Data mining is the strategy of sifting through massive
datasets to uncover patterns, trends, and other truths
about data that aren’t initially visible using machine
learning, statistics, and database systems. There are
several data mining techniques that business analytics
can pull from, including regression, clustering, and
outlier detection.
 This is a useful element of business analytics as it leads
to faster and more efficient decision making.
 Through data mining, a business may be able to see
which customers are buying specific products at certain
times of the year. This data can then be used to
segment those customers
 Text mining
 Text mining is the process of extracting high-
quality information from the text on apps
and throughout the World Wide Web.
 Companies use text mining to collect textual
information from social media sites, blog
comments, and even call center scripts.
Then, this data is used to improve customer
service and experience, develop new
products, and review the performance of
their competitors.
 Data aggregation
 The process of data aggregation consists of
gathering and collecting the data, which is then
presented in a summarized format. Essentially,
before it can be analyzed, it needs to be
collected, centralized, cleaned, and then filtered
to remove any inaccuracies or redundancies. 
 An example of data aggregation would be how a
marketing team uses data like customer
demographics and metrics (age, location, number
of transactions, etc.) to personalize their
messaging and offers..
 Forecasting
 When business analytics are used to analyze
processes that occurred during a specific
period or season, businesses are provided
with a forecast of future events or behaviors,
thanks to historical data.
 Forecasting can be used for several different
things, such as retail sales around specific
holidays and spikes in specific internet
searches around certain events - like an
award show or the Super Bowl.
 Data visualization
 For all you visual learners out there, data
visualization is an absolute must-have part
of business analytics. It seamlessly takes the
information and insights drawn from your
data and presents it in an interactive graph
or chart.  
 The right data visualization software is
crucial to this process to help track business
metrics and KPIs in real-time so you can
better understand performance and goals
WHY IS BUSINESS ANALYTICS
IMPORTANT?
 Improves performance by giving your
business a clear picture of what is and isn’t
working
 Provides faster and more accurate decisions
 Minimizes risks as it helps a business make
the right choices regarding consumer
behavior, trends, and performance
 Inspires change and innovation by answering
questions about the consumer
SCOPE OF BUSINESS ANALYTICS
 Business analytics has a wide range of application and
usages. It can be used for descriptive analysis in which data
is utilized to understand past and present situation. This
kind of descriptive analysis is used to asses’ current market
position of the company and effectiveness of previous
business decision.
 It is used for predictive analysis, which is typical used to
asses’ previous business performance.
 Business analytics is also used for prescriptive analysis,
which is utilized to formulate optimization techniques for
stronger business performance.
 For example, business analytics is used to determine pricing
of various products in a departmental store based past and
present set of information.
BENEFITS OF BUSINESS
ANALYTICS
1. Improve Customer Service
 Customers are spoiled by the number of choices available. They turn to analytics to ensure
organizations can maintain their client base. Companies should examine the relationship between
consumers and prior buying behaviors, for example. Based on this knowledge, they can analyze
trends and enhance the efficiency of their website. It can be as easy as delivering a push prompt
product to the shopping cart by consumers. In general, this would lead to improved consumer
service and consequently more loyalty.
2. Make Informed Decisions
 Companies also outsource some of their operations to increase productivity. When choosing a
vendor to do so they must know which vendor would offer additional revenues. The pace of
delivery of the order, consistency, etc can be measured using analytics based on consumer
reviews. These data help them determine which one fits better for the company.
3. Performance Enhancement
 The productivity of workers is not always limited. Businesses should also evaluate other tools and
understand more. For example, by simply measuring the temperatures of in-store coolers, the
grocery store chain has lowered cooling costs. It was noticed that many degrees less than required
were kept in the refrigerators, thereby increasing the power consumption. Thus the cost of
energy decreased without impacting healthy food storage by raising the temperature.
4. Fraud Identify
 Finance businesses have been using fraud reduction analytics. One way of doing this by using data
in an audit of past consumer sales to detect possible suspicious purchases. To determine the
consumer profiles and risk level, the businesses use predictive analytics. The importance of
business analytics methodology helps to assess the probability of losses and to create better
consumer connections with the customers.