More and more of the modern business world is being influenced by the flow of data.
Whether you work in finances, marketing, human resources, or even warehousing and retail, your job is likely driven by many forms of data. Sorting through all of this can be overwhelming, so how do you use the seemingly random streams of data to make better decisions in your business?
The answer is by utilizing and leveraging the four fundamental types of data analytics depending on where you are in the decision process and what challenges you aim to solve.
- Descriptive Analytics provides a comprehensive overview of past performance and where your business currently stands. This should serve to lay out all the facts so your decision-makers can judge what’s happened.
- Diagnostic Analytics also strongly focuses on the past while digging a little deeper into the data using probabilities, likelihood, and distribution to determine the cause and effect of why something happened.
- Predictive Analytics uses the insights gained from descriptive and diagnostic analytics to forecast potential events and outcomes in the future. Using statistics and machine learning, analysts are able to determine what will happen if certain conditions are met.
- Prescriptive Analytics helps businesses achieve their goals by building on predictive analytics to determine a specific course of action. Prescriptive analytics is constantly learning and reiterating data to determine the correlation between cause and effect.
Understanding when to apply these four types of analytics help organizations learn from the past, make more accurate predictions about the future, and create specific action plans to reach their goals.
Not sure where to begin? Advia Consulting can help your team learn how best to make data-driven decisions and predictions to improve efficiency and save you money. Reach out to us today to learn how our team of 100% US-based financial experts can help your business succeed in the modern world of business analytics.