Benefits:
The use of appropriate analytic technologies offers the following benefits to the organisation:
- Greater understanding of how the businesses is really performing
- Improved communication of concepts and ideas from business analysts to decision makers
- Faster answers to common questions
- Reliable and Accurate answers to complex or unusual questions
- Confidence in results
- Better decisions
In a Nutshell
Analytics is a term often used to describe both the process of analysing data to discover how a business is performing, and the tools used to do the analysis.
The difference between analysis and reporting is that reports only report the answers to pre-defined questions. Analytics allows a user to ask new questions they have never thought of before, to dig deeper into the data and to find underlying patterns.
For example a standard monthly report might include tables showing “Sales, profit and margin of the regional business sectors this month” and “Top 3 sales people this month and over the year” Using an analysis tool however, the user would be able to start with, for example the salesman report, then analyse what the top salesmen were doing differently to the others.
This might show that they were not selling more, but that they were closing sales with less discount, or that they were concentrating just on high-margin lines. Finding these patterns requires an analysis tool rather than a reporting tool, as the users don't know what data they need to see until they start the analysis.
There are different types of analysis tool, appropriate for different sizes of business and expertise of users.
At the simplest end, but still very powerful, is the Excel pivot table. Unlike a flat table of data in Excel, the pivot table lets users drag the fields they want onto the report area, nesting levels as required. So a report that starts with Sales by region by Month, can then be broken down by products, or changed to show profit, all within Excel.
At the very high end are data mining and exploration tools such as PolyVista, which offers a wealth of complex graphical interfaces to the data, allowing very subtle patterns in the data to be visualised in 3D images. Between these extremes are other tools such as QlikTech, ProClarity and others.
Altimus always works with our customers to ensure that they have tools that are appropriate to their needs and the expertise of their users. Unlike some consultancies, tied to one vendor's technology, Altimus is able to offer a range of solutions from our partners, and will deliver a. solution that users are comfortable with, will actually use, and which will bring the most benefit to your organisation.
For more information on individual analytics tools, follow the links to our partners, or contact Altimus on..
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