Information is as valuable an asset for companies as their product. For this reason, businesses that seek to grow must focus on strategically controlling information and taking advantage of it.
Proper data management in the industry is essential for all supply chain activities to develop optimally. But how can it be achieved? Basically, companies must:
- Know precisely and rigorously how the company’s assets work.
- Possess a large amount of data.
- Encourage their data analysts to think critically.
- Implement robust tools for Business Analytics (BA).
All this will help direct data analysis towards success, and it will be easier to make decisions at all levels: capital investment, production systems, location, error reduction, etc. In addition, when digitization is combined with data management and the critical thinking of the organization’s employees, it creates the foundations for transformation into Industry 4.0.
Analysis when data is not perfect.
While the vast amount of data available to organizations today can be overwhelming, the fact that some of it are inaccurate or of poor quality further compounds the problem.
Even when machines enter the correct values that produce accurate results, the people who operate them often make errors that ultimately distort the results.
Therefore, waiting for perfect data to start your analysis is probably a fruitless endeavor. Instead, it is best to focus on continually improving the analysis and asking the right questions that produce the answers your business needs to thrive and expand.
How to get the most out of data.
The first step for data analysis to generate positive results is to formulate a long-term plan and goal before you start collecting information. Since storing and analyzing data can be expensive, it is crucial to identify in advance what the purpose of your data is. Once you have established this purpose, it becomes possible to begin to satisfy the company’s needs with the analysis.
A couple of years ago, 89% of CEOs believed that they would lose market share due to a lack of knowledge about data management and big data. Given a large amount of data available from various sources, organizations often:
- Fail to correctly identify what needs to be analyzed.
- Propose hypotheses that are ultimately not corroborated.
Hence, it is not only in the data collection and management process that value is added but also in the execution of an analysis that allows the transformation of the data into solutions for the commercial problems of the business.
Analytics software is often blamed when goals are not fully achieved, not considering that employees themselves may lack some of the critical thinking skills needed to get the most out of data analytics.
According to Sadhguru, “When the mind is full of assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs, it has no insight; it just repeats past impressions.” By implementing BA tools, it is possible to break this conventional thinking and start solving unusual and more complex problems, giving way to critical thinking that helps data analysts to:
- Identify precisely what type of information the company is interested in.
- Determine the problems that affect the performance and profitability of the business, as well as develop predictive models to choose the most appropriate solutions.
- Provide valuable insights about customers to make strategic decisions more quickly.
- Perform more useful predictive analytics.
- Identify and solve specific and inconspicuous problems.
- Better understand customer behavior patterns from information such as who visits the website to who repeatedly buys the products.
However, to achieve this, you must consider multiple data sources, including web server logs, internet click tracking data, social activity reports, media, mobile phones, call detail logs, information captured by sensors, transactions, and more. We are then in the presence of extensive data analysis.
Who can reap the benefits of data analytics and big data?
Big data is frequently associated with marketing and e-commerce. However, the information is not limited to these sectors.
Companies across industries can benefit from data in many ways. Data can be used to not only identify how to differentiate themselves from the competition but also to detect errors or problems before they even occur.
For example, e-commerce uses data to evaluate its users’ browsing behavior, allowing them to better understand their buyers, their habits, and their needs. Effective use of this information guarantees an increase in profit margins.
However, to ensure that data analysis will lead to more productive decisions that generate more revenue, it will be necessary to:
- Consider that the possibilities for gathering information are almost endless, ranging from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to transactional data.
- Sort and clean the collected data to identify what information is needed and what is not, according to the stated objective. This does not mean that these data will not be helpful on another occasion. Therefore, it is essential to store some of them in other databases with the potential for future consultation.
- Evaluate the relevance and reliability of the data; if mistakes are made during the data collection, they could be unusable.
- Be clear about:
- How much you know about the data and the collection process.
- How often the information is updated and where it is stored.
- How confidential or secure the stored information is
- Boost the skills of your data analysts as much as possible.
By following these recommendations, your organization is ready to transform data and provide it as understandable information that everyone in the organization can understand and profitably use.
At this point, it is essential to know that data analysis and technology must be closely correlated. These are aspects that CAN NOT work efficiently if they are separated! The key is expanding resources and investing in computing infrastructure and data analytics technology.
Fortunately, you have come to the right place. Our BA tool, Keenlog Analytics, is the perfect solution to achieve your business goals efficiently and at a low cost through data analysis and visualization.
Visualize your data like never before
Genuine data-driven companies take care of how they digitally obtain exponential amounts of data. However, it is challenging to keep up with such a large amount of information without software that collects, classifies, and presents it so that specialists can make timely and accurate interpretations.
At CeleriTech, we focus on enabling SMEs to efficiently analyze SAP Business One data with our BA solution, Keenlog Analytics. As a result, you can:
- Obtain your business’s most influential metrics (KPIs) based on real-time information.
- Facilitate understanding of the most critical processes of the supply chain.
- Empower all users in your organization to answer the right questions at the right time.
All this is under the support of a specialized team and a unique, intuitive, affordable platform that will be up and running in just ten days.
Want a first-hand experience of Keenlog Analytics?
