With businesses cautiously resuming their operations after the imposed lockdown, organizations are relying on analytics to navigate them through this economic downturn. Analytics can play a significant role in helping organizations make data-driven decisions that improve their operational efficiencies, explore new business territories, cut costs, and anticipate risks and opportunities thereby enabling them to understand their business better. The pandemic has demanded businesses to use data analytics to arrive at ideas to emerge from the crisis. Prescriptive, descriptive, and predictive analytics tools have helped organizations with valuable insights to make informed decisions to restore their business operations. Businesses can leverage the benefits of analytics through a variety of ways which includes:
- Boosting business process and operations: Data analytics helps organizations to streamline their business process increasing productivity and performance. This has been confirmed by a recent report by KPMG which revealed that many businesses use predictive analytics to anticipate operational issues to avoid problems in the future. It also plays a significant role in measuring performance indicators across various domains by comparing past and present data giving organizations a clear picture of the efficiency.
- Monitor and improve financial performance: Data analytics helps companies find new ways to cut costs. This is extremely important for organizations as they move through economic uncertainty where revenues are not accurately predictable. Analytics identifies correlations in data sets and provides valuable insights about pricing segmentation and cost valuations which enable businesses to streamline their operations.
- Ensure the safety of employees: As offices reopen after the lockdown, organizations are using analytics to make decisions to ensure the safety of its employees as they start working together again by using tools to manage the proximity between the employees, creating a flexible work schedule to avoid crowding, etc. An example is that of Globus AI, a Scandinavian AI company helps organizations to create shifts that pairs employees who need to work together for better outputs. Analytics can also ensure employee safety by developing new office layouts which makes it easier for employees to ensure social distancing norms in the workplace.
- Identify newer opportunities: Analytics helps businesses to identify new opportunities like discovering the untapped customer segments.
Thus analytics will help businesses overcome the present crisis, also enable them to be flexible and adopt practices to tackle the subsequent crisis and hurdles.
