How to Use Operational Analytics Solutions to Improve the Performance of your Business

Until now, analytics has mainly focused on customer and sales analytics. But this is expanding: at the moment, there are signs that companies are also incorporating analytics into their operational processes.

Why this is so: there is inherently high potential for using operational analytics solutions. It can also be used to validate and standardize “individual truths,” analyzing employees’ or departments’ assessments.

What is the difference between “business analytic” and “business intelligence”?

Companies are often faced with the question of which of the two approaches – business intelligence or business analytics – achieves the most significant benefit and should therefore be chosen. But what is actually behind these two terms, and where are the differences? We want to provide answers to these questions.

Business Intelligence (BI) is a method for systematically analyzing companies. Establishing a reliable basis for business decisions is the overriding goal. To achieve this goal, a BI system collects data from various sources, evaluates it, and then displays it graphically. Accordingly, classic BI solutions provide only past-based evaluations.

In contrast, business analytics (BA) additionally deals with future forecasts. This is a critical differentiator between the two approaches. In other words, it is about solutions for building simulations and analysis models so that the ACTUAL state can be better assessed and reliable forecasts for the future can be made.

How to develop an operational analysis strategy?

1. Start by exploring your options and identifying your top priorities.
2. Determine what you want to achieve and understand what tools are needed and the associated costs.
3. Identify essential metrics such as MTTD and MTTD, including appropriate error thresholds.
4. Determine what systems and data you need to integrate to calculate metrics.
5. Create a data cleaning strategy. Data cleansing is a three-step process, where the first step is to determine who will be responsible for the actual cleansing process. Next is cleaning the conversion, followed by deciding what tool you will use to get the most out of your data.

Self-service BA allows users to create their reports and customize their presentations. The design of corresponding BI solutions is intended to enable users to independently implement data exploration even without programming and IT knowledge. This allows users to answer questions without IT experts. This saves resources and working time.

How does operational analysis work?

With real-time analysis, you can check data in what is called near-real-time as soon as it arrives in your systems. This gives you immediate information that can alert you to errors in your system before they get worse. The key performance metrics tracked in the operational analysis are the mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to response (MTTR). MTTD describes the time that passes between the occurrence of a problem and its detection. MTTR describes the time it takes to neutralize a threat or error in your network environment. Accessing these business metrics allows you to make decisions that are in the best interest of your organization.

The main benefits of rapid analysis are rapid problem identification (MTTD) and equally rapid problem resolution (MTTR). By reducing MTTD and MTTR, you can minimize the cost of downtime, secure revenue, and protect against risk. You can also expect less downtime, more efficient use of capacity, and lower costs. Scalability is an integral part of operational analytics. Scaling allows your business to monitor more system components and protect your assets.

Scope of business analytics:

• In education, business analytics is used to measure student-specific metrics and, thus, identify potential dropouts promptly. Teachers with BI can also better assess the impact of specific teaching methods on individual student outcomes.
• In healthcare, using business analytics can reduce erroneous or duplicate data, thereby improving data quality. It reduces the amount of manual labor and provides more accurate reporting. A centralized data warehouse enables predictive analytics that reveals patterns of risk in patients and promotes more effective treatment.
• Modern business analytics platforms also provide a quick centralized overview of the food service industry: key metrics such as peak hours or best-sellers can be quickly viewed in automatically generated reports. Based on purchasing results, staff deployment or opening hours of individual branches can be adjusted according to demand.

Would you do without an assistant who competently advises you and reliably points out possible risks and opportunities? And always have all your key metrics in real-time? Here’s how BA software works for you. Admittedly, you still have to deduce the proper measures yourself. But if you want to improve the quality and performance of your business, a business intelligence solution is a must. Especially with today’s self-service platforms, anyone authorized can easily view and understand your data. This means that users of all skill levels share responsibility and have access to customizable dashboards or ad hoc reports themselves.

Modern operational analytics solutions for business

Operational analytics solutions end speculation about customer behavior, purchasing, sales, and supply chain processes. On the contrary, it changes how you, your colleagues, and management make decisions. Previously reserved for large corporations, business intelligence is now available to smaller companies thanks to cloud computing and other advances.

When used correctly, data can help you in all company areas, from compliance and data protection to human resource management.

Current trends include:

• In times of cost-effective cloud computing, more and more nonprofits have access to data environments. At the same time, collaboration with analytics companies increases the impact of social projects.
• Ethical data practices are coming into focus. In addition to collecting and securing data, this also involves its use in practice.
• Working with data and deriving meaningful measures is something that concerns everyone today. With the help of visual storytelling, the findings are communicated to all decision-makers in an understandable way.
• With the help of self-service BA, everyone can access business-relevant data and create reports or perform analyses. This relieves the burden on IT departments.
• Cloud solutions are moving data to the cloud faster and faster. Companies must therefore adapt their data strategy: On-premise, structured data warehouses are giving way to more flexible environments that scale quickly.

In finance, for example, operational analytics are used to understand the key performance indicators of different bank branches and identify opportunities. Important critical data about the asset or lending situation can be viewed and compared on a central dashboard with just a few clicks. At the branch level, business analytics can also be used to identify the investment needs of different customers based on data to present the right financial product promptly.

Big data, and machine learning, will be with us for a long time and will continue to evolve. Companies must adapt their data strategy to cope with the data jungle and stay competitive. Thanks to trends like visual storytelling and self-service platforms, the barrier is lower now than ever. So it’s not a question of whether you need a business intelligence solution, but which one? So, Euristiq helps to find an effective solution for automating company-specific processes. It is better to seek help from experts for a quick and effective solution.