Competing on Data Analytics

Competing on Analytics

This case study advocates the importance of data analytics for an organization. It has given comparative studies that state the usefulness of data analytics for any company and how it can drive growth and customer satisfaction.
Data analytics helps in optimizing decision-making to calculate choose the best alternatives uses predictive analytics to estimate the future events, uses forecasting to understand the trend, uses statistical models to know the reason behind all. It also alerts on the actions need to be taken, drill down to gauge the core problem, prepares a report on past data and future events.
Analytics helps in best customers’ search and charging them right price. It also helps in minimizing inventory and allocating costs accurately through detailing on financial performance.

Analytics should be centrally located so that all the movement and interaction could be assessed from one place and a master data could be used for analysis to understand the health of whole a organization.
Employees must be motivated to take the decision based on hard facts, and not on random intuition. An organization can implement this through incentivizing the employees whose decisions are based on analysis and facts rather than mind tricks. Along with that, an organization can also hire right people – experts from the field of quantitative analytics and who can to drill down through complex data, and come up with a solution in simple terms.
Use of right technology is also a must. As to integrate the data of the whole organization, relying on poor data management tools may hamper the performance when chunk load of data will be used at once. Therefore, installing right CRM or ERP with a setup of standard data warehouse can solve the problem.
An example of Marriott International is mentioned in this case stating how this hotel uses Total Hotel Optimization Program to expand its quantitative expertise to various areas, and how it has used this tool to cater according to each customer’s specific demands.
It has been mentioned that relying only on statistical tools are not the only thing analytically competitive companies do, they use data analytics to predict future expected customer surge or fall, and then take calculated decision based on that.
Correct use of data analytics does not apply to the business field; it has ample applicability in other fields also, like baseball (i.e. as depicted in Moneyball) and others. Using analytics New England Patriots won three of the four last Super Bowls.
There are three major pillars for effective data analytics in an organization. They are (i) right focus – instead of getting distracted with huge amount of data from every facets, organization should focus on single aspect at a time, (ii) right culture – use of analytics should be encouraged and rewarded, and (iii) right people – keeping people who are data oriented is more beneficial than those who has less orientation.

Lessons Learnt: 

Analytics should be embedded into the whole system of an organization, be it operational decision making, business processes, manager or employee behavior, customer expectations to drive desired growth.

Recommendations: 

Based on this study, it can be said, that any organization that lack on analytics, has less chance of sustainable growth. Therefore, focus of the organizations should be turned to analytics, rather than intuition-based decisions.