Perhaps you’ve been running a company for many years—maybe even your entire career thus far. Perhaps you ran a family business and inherited your management style from a parent or grandparent. You know what to expect when you walk into the office, drop your keys on the desk the same way, drape your jacket over your swivel chair and get to work. You don’t need someone to tell you how to run your business—you’ve been doing it for ages and know how it’s done best.
Though, the thing is that the world is changing all the time and, lately, it’s been changing more than ever. What worked even five years ago won’t work today. Business isn’t as usual, especially now that everything has been remote and online for most years. Your go-to-market strategy, which has guided you through thick and thin, needs to change. And it would help if you used data analytics to do it. The good news for you is that, according to the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant Data Science report, some intriguing software options are out there, making waves in data analytics.
It’s not just any data analytics that will get you through these tough times and into a bright future with happy customers and exponential growth. You need to be able to predict the future with as much accuracy as humanly possible. Of course, no one can tell you exactly what the future will hold, but you can get pretty close by amassing large quantities of raw data and using predictive analytics techniques. These statistical analysis techniques will give you insights into trends in the historical data and show you where your potential customers are right now and where they’re likely to be a few months later.
Find out what may go wrong tomorrow to prevent failures today.
By applying statistical analysis techniques to raw historical data, predictive analytics can observe opportunities for mistakes and failures. For example, predictive data analytics may reveal the degree to which you may experience weather-related failures or delays by looking at how these failures or delays have been fluctuating over the past few years. It’s not enough to know that hurricane season lasts from June to November. How many hurricanes have taken place in past years? What has their severity been? Where exactly have they been making landfall? All of this can be used to inform and predict how your operations will look during those months to a much more specific degree.
Understand risk and reward in greater depth.
Risk is necessary for business; any business leader knows that. But how much trouble should you take on, and when, and what are the likely outcomes of that risk? Looking at the historical data in detail and predicting how the insights and trends will likely play out can help you avoid taking on unnecessary or ill-advised risks. Take a good look at the data by using business intelligence solutions and side-step major potential pitfalls.
Be prepared for maintenance to streamline operations.
Many large business operations include complex machinery and equipment, whether on a factory floor or in the field on a commercial farm. As you know by now, machines break down, and equipment fails. But when will it fail? In the middle of the harvest, perhaps? To avoid that kind of eventuality, predictive analytics, and business intelligence solutions can keep tabs on your equipment, regardless of how many machines you have, and predict when they’re likely to break down. As a result, you’ll be prepared and have the devices up and running in no time.
