Analytics and Big Data, and how it has started helping organizations today

When we say big data, the thing that first comes to mind is huge volume of data. Yes, in a nutshell that's true, it is huge volumes of data, but consider this as organizational data with volumes of both structured and unstructured data. This could be data from different databases, shop floor data, marketing data in excel or other formats, data coming in from social media or any other source.

With ERP applications now being adapted widely by organizations, companies have their day to day operations streamlined. Managers can get specific reports to view data as per their needs. However churning out a report from an ERP system is often a time consuming affair. ERP applications are extremely complex transaction processing systems and most of the ERP systems are great at getting data in rather than getting good information out.

Most of the reports pulled in from ERP systems are static reports considering a certain set of parameters. However a dynamic change in request of parameters or some other information is to be seen then considerable time and effort is spent by IT staff to compile and create the report which would fulfill the specific information request.

So in reality you have huge amount of data available, but it becomes cumbersome and at times difficult for top management to get a birds eye view of the data to make intelligent decisions. Management wants to spot trends say in production, quality related data, or want to spot trends in sales of a particular market over a period of time, which of the product line is performing best, which product is low on sales, how to spot trends to reverse this and boost sales. Most of this data is present in the organization, but there is no intelligent system showcasing this data in a visual format with the flexibility to choose parameters on the fly and correlate them with other parameters to spot insights and trends.

This is where the gap in information can be filled in with a good business intelligence and analytics solution. Most BI solutions provide a single platform to extract and prepare the data for businesses to create intelligent visualizations and analytics on the same. Irrespective of the data source, a robust BI solution implementation would involve creating a multidimensional OLAP based cube which forms a base to handle complex business queries and churning reports within a matter of seconds.

An organization can then create personalized dashboards suiting to the day to day information needs of managers from different departments and also for the top management. As we live in an information age where most of the information around us is available on our fingertips, then why should businesses not use the technology if it is available to create intelligent, fast, ready information to make the right business decisions, reduce costs and improve profitability.