Exploring the reasons behind growing interest in analytics

Day by day, data is generated from different resources, which makes a significant impact on our daily life for different purposes. Here we discuss a few topics which are growing interest in different areas.

• Healthcare: Healthcare analytics is playing an important role in different dimensions. Hospitals are collecting and analyzing patient clinical data to understand diseases and for future disease management. Many health apps are collecting the data and actively monitoring our heart rate, sleeping patterns, and other vitals and provide a personalized recommendation so that we adjust our lifestyle for wellbeing.
• Predicting the patient risk: In healthcare, predicting the patient risk is a very critical task based on the previous history of the patients, line of treatment, and their response. Such type of data will be helpful for medical professionals to make decisions.
• Reducing the patient treatment cost: Physicians can get better insights by analyzing the clinical data and they can provide precise treatment.
• Urban Planning: In town planning to smart cities, analytics is constantly applied. Analytics allows town planners to understand the cities, and how they function. For example, understanding the public transportation facility and daily traffic, understating peak hours and diverting the traffic accordingly to avoid traffic jams. These days, with the help of sensors and cameras, we can analyse the daily traffic in real-time. This data can help the authorities to allocate the resources for the selected place. With the help of analytics, we can even reduce the investment cost of the transportation system.
• Analysis of traffic: Analyzing traffic patterns of the public can give us insights into daily busy routes, peak hours, and peak days. With these insights. decision-makers can divert the traffic accordingly.
• Efficient use of the transportation system: By understanding the peak hours, transport system can plan their routes and reduce the costs.
• E-Commerce: Doing business online is entirely different from traditional offline business.In today’s competitive e-commerce space, customers like to access product details easily on the web. To understand consumer behavior, e-commerce companies are leveraging analytics. Hence, to reach the customer expectation, analytics plays a significant role along with a recommendation system. And for managing the total supply chain process from taking orders for delivery, big e-commerce players like Walmart are totally dependent on analytics for their day-to-day activities and decision-making to avoid out-of-stock items from the inventory space.
• Data-driven product development: In today’s online space, customer has a huge choice with high expectations in the market. It is critical for companies to meet customer expectations. Being in possesion of data about the product in which the customer is interested in helps in product designing and development process.
• Managing the inventory: To manage the orders and to keep the record up to date, ecommerce analytics plays a key role.  For example, planning the sales for the upcoming session.
• Targeting existing customers: It is estimated that 60% of business will come from existing customers and targeting new customers is quite expensive. From online customer data, we can study the behavior of customers and cross-sell the products.
• Analyze the ads for maximum returns: From ad analytics, we can analyze which ad has the most impact on customers further it leading to creating such ads.
• Customer recommendation: Analytics plays a key role in providing personalised experience to customers. According to Epsilon research, 80% of customers are likely to purchase when brands provide a personalised experience.
• Energy Management: With the help of a Smart meter, energy consumption can be optimized by analyzing daily usage patterns. Based on the consumer usage behavior, weather conditions and weekday, analytics will help in managing the electricity in peak hours to provide a better service.
• Monitoring the energy: We can monitor the electricity usage among the consumers. Accordingly, we can plan the load allocation.
• Load balancing: By identifying the non-usage and usage of electricity, we can divert the load to highly consumed places.
• Fixing the breakdowns: By analyzing the patterns of breakdowns we can fix the breakdowns and increase the efficiency.
• Finance:  Every business requires proper financial planning and forecasting. Financial analytics helps companies to understand financial data deeply and act accordingly to improve their business. Analytics can also help the firms to observe the viability of products across several sales segments and examine which segment could affect them in the future.
• Profit analysis: By leveraging analytics we can analyse different clients.
• Product analytics: Instead of analyzing the total profit of a company, many companies are interested in individual product analytics and their profitability.
• Cash flow: Analytics on cash flow can get insights on the cash conservation cycle and predict cash flow for future decision-making.
• Value driver’s analysis: To run businesses, we require to identify the key indicators of the business to achieve targets.

However, while getting insights from historical data it must be from reliable sources and of good quality. Analyzing poor quality data can impact the decision process. Firms must maintain and manage good quality data to perform analytics to get insights for decision making.

The article has been written by  Dr T Santosh, Assistant Professor- School of Business, Woxsen University