Competitive Advantage Through Analytics

22 Mar, 2012

Analytics software can help Hispanic businesses increase success

Businesses are always looking for ways to gain competitive advantage. One innovative way businesses are increasing their profits, growth and overall success is through the use of business analytics. Analytics software identifies pertinent data and uses it to evaluate past and present performance in order to inform future strategy.

Despite how it sounds, it’s not just for big businesses. Small Hispanic-owned businesses and those catering to specific niche groups can benefit as well. Any organization that wants to better predict future trends is a candidate for a business analytics solution. Business analytics explores data to find patterns (this is called data mining), strives to explain why a certain result occurred, analyzes statistics, tests past business decisions and, based on data collected, helps forecast future trends and results.

Analytics in Action

Data related to the combination of products offered on a website can be studied to find useful patterns. The frequency with which a prospective customer looks at a particular item can be tracked, as well as the ratio of how often a product was viewed in comparison with actual sales of the product. This kind of data will demonstrate how effective the product information has been in informing a purchasing decision. To improve performance, even small changes to product combinations, placement, price or promotion can be implemented, and then tested against these indicators.

In addition to monitoring Hispanic news, a company selling products geared toward the Hispanic market could monitor spikes or dips in sales around certain events, holidays or in the wake of media events. This data would then be analyzed and be used to guide future business decisions and improve sales.

Retailers can use business analytics to optimize sales in individual stores as well as at the regional or national levels. The data can help identify trends in sales in particular geographic locations, perhaps even correlating these trends with specific seasons or times of year. This sort of analysis is only possible if data is collected from sales at all of the stores over a period of time. When used to manage inventories, specific metrics can help determine where certain product lines could be moved to sell at optimal times throughout the year.

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