Today, cloud applications are generating huge volumes of data. From Service Life-Cycle Management (SLM) to Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), services are gaining pace. Due to this, organizations need some technology that can extract valuable data from a vast array of data. 

Many business analytics tools and techniques have been devised to deliver seamless solutions. These analytical tools allow data collection, analysis, and presentation to empower organizations and identify ongoing trends or patterns. 

With the help of these, organizations will also innovate their solutions to retain their customers and attract new ones. These latest tools have developed an easy means for professionals to work and produce better results. 

Today, let’s know all about these analytic tools and their significance to businesses.

What are Business Analytics Tools? 

Business analysis is a sector of any industry that works towards identifying the trends and needs and presenting relevant solutions. This process is an integral part that helps businesses to overcome future challenges. 

Business analysis is carried out through business analytics tools. Business analysts use these tools to review and analyze the data to make informed decisions. The primary goal of these tools is to enhance the performance of business by identifying the areas that can be optimized efficiently. 

These tools include software, data visualization technology, and machine learning algorithms that capture both qualitative and quantitative data from different systems and implement them into a repository. 

Business analytics is the process of collecting, organizing, analyzing, and interpreting data to get valuable insights. Statistical and quantitative analysis methods are used to extract insights. Business analytic tools are used in various areas of business, such as marketing, sales, operations, customer service, and finance. 

If you have started your business analysis journey, you can boost your career by acquiring a PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PMI-PBA) Certification.

Difference Between Business Intelligence Solutions and Business Analytics

Business intelligence (BI) and business analytics are two different concepts. Business intelligence is a process of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data to make informed decisions. It focuses on past data and generates reports and dashboards to summarize data. 

On the other hand, business analytics follow in-depth reports and go beyond data analysis. It uses statistical and predictive methods to analyze data and identify trends and patterns to make predictions about future outcomes. It focuses on finding specific solutions to business problems.

Importance of Analytic Tools for Business

Business analytics are of great importance for any organization. It allows data-driven decision-making, better customer insights, improved performance, and helps in risk management and competitive advantage. Let’s discuss all the significance of using these analytic tools for business: 

Better Decision Making 

Analytics helps to evaluate data and comprehend different insights. It enables us to decide which insight best suits the company’s situation and maximizes profit. These tools are becoming most in-demand and crucial for modern business models. 

Identifies Frauds

With these analytical tools, organizations can identify any fraudulent purchases. They use predictive analytics to review the customer’s profile and check the status of purchases. 

Customized Customer Experience

Analytical tools enable organizations to determine the customer’s interactions with their website. The data involved can be analyzed and used in such a way that it improves the overall website’s performance. Organizations can attract more customers through push notifications when they shop from the official website. This will not only improve their customer interaction but also promote customer loyalty. 

Increases Employee Turnover

In case of reduced employee turnover, your HR team can use these tools to determine the possibility of an employee aligning with your organization’s culture. They can track the performance and growth of the employee and identify the long-term employees in the company. 

Survive During Crisis

Nowadays, many companies are struggling due to the global economic crisis and looking for the opportunity to return their profits back to normal. The data analytic tools for businesses assist them in overcoming the challenges in the process and implementing effective crisis management solutions.

Top 10 Data Analytic Tools for Business

1. QlikView

• This tool was launched by a business analysis and software company with the name QuikView. 
• It is the most recommended tool for business analytics as it has unique features like ultra-fast report delivery, patented technology, and in-memory processing. 
• It helps you to comprehend important business insights and know what data are not significant without any prior programming. It uses different colors to show related and non-related data in the data association. 
• QlikView is meant for small startups and individual learners who want support to create visualization, charts, and interactive dashboards. 
• You can handle this tool easily if you have basic knowledge of SQL and VB scripts. 

2. Tableau

• Tableau is a tool that has customizable features and provides users with interactive work progressions. 
• This tool allows users to do in-depth analysis of social media and predicts trends based on past and present data. 
• Tableau includes strong dynamic and cutting-edge capabilities for unarranged text or data analysis. 
• This versatile tool can be used in various departments like shipping, sales, support, and finance. 
• Moreover, you can learn to use this tool through an instructor-led program- Tableau Desktop Level 1: Introduction for Experienced IT Professionals. 

3. Splunk

• Splunk is the most commonly used tool in small to medium-scale businesses. 
• First, it was launched to process machine log file data, and since then, it has got lots of new sophisticated features like a user-friendly interface and several visualization options. 
• It searches, monitors, and analyzes the machine-generated data from a searchable repository. 
• This tool captures, indexes, and finds correlations between real-time data to generate reports, graphs, dashboards, etc. 

4. Microstrategy

• Microstrategy software tool involves superior analytical capabilities that help users process unstructured text data. 
• These data can be analyzed by experts to study further and derive valuable insights from the platform’s text analytics solutions. 
• This tool is the most updated tool that incorporates insightful statistical and analytical capabilities. 
• This enables real-time patterns and trends to forecast the options for third-party mining.
• This top-rated tool allows a wide range of business analysis processes and lets users create and share reports from anywhere, anytime. 

5. SAS

• This is a high-grade tool that offers strong text analytics capabilities of SAS-based business software. 
• It allows users to inspect and transform unstructured text data into relevant information. 
• These relevant data are used by specialists to explore and discover some meaningful insights into the organization. 
• SAS business analytics tool is a tool with a wide range of statistical and analytical capabilities. 
• It simplifies the large sets of data and streamlines the process of analysis. 
• This top-line tool helps to predict future trends from relevant information from a large dataset. 

6. Excel

• Microsoft Excel is the most common tool that is used to analyze large data sets. 
• It offers user options to share workbooks, uploads data directly, and performs on the most recent version for real-time collaboration.
• Excel is today used by almost every business to derive actionable insights from large data. 
• With Excel, you can add premium stock photos and backgrounds to documents without any charge. 
• This tool is one of the cheapest and most commonly used analytical tools worldwide. 
• Everyone needs to work in Excel, even if they don’t have experience. In organizations, Excel is a must to know. 
• To know the fundamentals of Excel, you can take the help of Microsoft Office Excel (2019-2016-2013): Basic course. 

7. Board

• The Board is one of the top-rated analytic tools for business. 
• This analytic model permits you to create custom, intuitive, and interactive user reports, dashboards, etc. 
• The board allows users to manage data volumes and support accurate analysis to forecast and manipulate data using visualization, drill-down, and dill-through functional options. 
• It is used by many small and large-scale industries that are looking for well-defined and real-time data analytic tools. 

8. Sisense 

• This is another popular tool that has dynamic and strong text analysis capabilities. 
• These capabilities help users to transform all the unstructured data into valuable business intelligence. 
• It has various sophisticated features that enable you to do in-depth analysis of vast data. 
• This improves the decision of the organization and enhances the result’s accuracy. 
• The Sisense tool features proprietary Sisense crowd-accelerated BI and uses open-source language for computational statistics. 

9. Apache Spark 

• Apache Spark is a data processing software that is primarily designed to analyze large amounts of data. 
• It is compatible with platforms such as Kubernetes, Hadoop, and Apache Mesos. 
• This tool is equipped with an in-memory data engine, making it quicker and developer-friendly. 
• Sparks can prove very effective in managing real-time data and training machine learning algorithms as it has a petabyte-scale speed and are highly flexible in their working.

10. TIBCO Spotfire

• TIBCO Spotfire is one of the finest tools used for business analytics. 
• This tool can be used to run business analytics reports and analysis reports in a set time period. 
• Spotfire offers automatic analytics solutions that make it faster than any other tool in the market. 
• There has been a recent update in this software that has improved its working significantly. It has improved statistical analysis capabilities to study unstructured text or data. 

What are the Key Applications of Business Analytics?

Some of the applications of business analytics in various industries are as follows – 

Marketing Campaigns

Business analytics can be effectively used to analyze customer behavior and design campaigns that resonate well with customer’s preferences. Furthermore, companies use business analytics tools to identify market opportunities and launch new products that align with customers’ purchasing patterns. 

Financial Analysis

Companies often find it difficult to manage their finances and find areas where they can cut down costs to amplify their profits. Here, analytic tools for business can help companies analyze their loan data and identify their profit and expenditures to predict the overall financial growth of the company. 

Moreover, these data can also highlight areas not yielding sufficient profits and where one can reduce cost and optimize their input-output ratio. 

Human Resource Management

One can use data analytic tools for business to study employee data based on several performance metrics and data collected from employee surveys. It can help businesses identify key issues that their employees are facing in their day-to-day jobs and do something to resolve them. Furthermore, it can also help HR in talent management and keeping track of top performers in the company. This data is very useful during increments and promotions. 

Healthcare Delivery System

Hospitals and pharmacy companies can use business analytics to analyze patients’ data and data about different diseases, medicines used, and their success rates. This can help pharma companies design medicines that can target the diseases well and have a greater efficacy. Along with this, the data can also help healthcare companies build more resilient infrastructure where they can ensure that health services reach patients on time. 

Supply Chain Management

Companies use business analytics to ensure that their operations are running well and to detect any fault in their supply chain. For insurance, a manufacturing company uses business analytics to analyze its production process, the logistics, and how long it takes for a product to go from the manufacturing plant to its customers. This data can help them identify the weak links in their business and take some actions to optimize their supply chain and meet deadlines.

What are the Technologies Used in Business Analytics?

If a business wants to employ these analytics tools well, the team members using these tools should have a clear idea of the following technologies: 

Source 

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is an essential component of business analytics as it is used to store large amounts of data that is to be processed by the tool. It also enables companies to access data and the business analytics tool from anywhere. Cloud storage can be expanded without any hindrance, making it hassle-free for the company to process and use large amounts of data. 

Data Visualization

Data visualization is another technology that data analytics tools use to visualize the data and interpret them in a better way to make it easier for decision-makers of the business to study them. Business analytics tools use data visualization to create graphs, charts, and visually appealing presentations that can help in better decision-making. 

AI and Machine Learning

Business analytics involves studying large amounts of data, and one way to do it is to use efficient technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. These technologies help companies identify patterns and derive key insights from swaths of data, which are impossible for a human to do in such a short duration. 

Predictive Analysis

Predictive analysis is a technology that can detect patterns and relations between past data and current trends in the data. It enables analytics tools to create decision trees and time-series forecasts and make the right predictions.

What are the Different Career Options in Business Analytics?

Some of the career options that one can explore in business analytics are: 

Data Scientists

Data scientists use business analytics along with knowledge of computer science and mathematics to generate analytical models that can be applied while studying the data. Their primary responsibility is to study big data, organize them, and analyze them to make a report for businesses. 

Business Analyst 

Business analysts or consultants are experts in a particular field and are responsible for suggesting new plans and making forecasts in their industry. They use data analytics in fields such as marketing, healthcare, hospitality, operations, automotive, retail, banking, aviation, and even design. 

Conclusion

After learning how to use business analytics tools, it is also important for businesses to choose the right tool, compare the business analytic tools’ prices, and get the best deal for themselves. However, if you want to make a career in data analytics, you should get the data science training today. Furthermore, if you want to build more on your skills, you can sign up for the Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure course that CSS Learning Academy provides.

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