Regardless of size, businesses across industries and sectors need to react much quicker to customer requests that can include everything from quotations and proposals to delivering on services. It does not stop there. Internal management, marketing initiatives, operational requirements and more need to be done more rapidly than in the past to ensure customer satisfaction and, in return, retention. This is where analytics comes into play.
Real-time analytics plays a pivotal role in gathering relevant information from the multitude of systems used in businesses today. In turn, this data is transformed into valuable information used for decision-making purposes or direct action to steer or execute work.
Nuanced definition
However, real-time analytics does not necessarily happen immediately due to the complexities and cost involved. Rather, it appears as the value derived in the process. The real-time aspect therefore means how information is made available to be analysed when required.
Up until recently, daily extracts were used as the basis for analytics. In fact, many organisations still rely on this. The constant drive to enhance and improve has seen this starting to change into much smaller time-increments or streamed data being used for analytics, such as transactions as they happen. Despite this growing need for more frequently updated sales reports, processing throughput charts, or parts per million quality tracking dashboards, real-time is relative to the industry that it is being applied to.
For instance, services like media streaming businesses, telephony providers or financial institutions that provide ‘instant loans’ would need to rely on real-time information to prevent delays that could negatively impact their customers. Analytics in these environments would therefore need to be ‘fast enough’ to inform processes and people to allow for insights, decisions and actions to be taken.
Deriving value
Being able to react based on the most up-to-date information not only gives a company an advantage over its competitors, but also contributes to improved effectiveness within an organisation. Generally, benefits can be grouped as follows:
- Capitalising on the situation by using and applying insights from the real-time analytics to the benefit of the business. Gaining competitive advantage by selling specific products sooner than competitors, or at more affordable price. Examples can include personalised real-time marketing where SMS, WhatsApp and other notifications are sent to customers when arriving at a mall based on their own preferences.
- Maintain continuous operations by understanding the status of processes, equipment or services, and being able to act on insights to, for example:
- Maintain or repair equipment before failures occur (manufacturing or processing); and
- Address service level issues to meet demand and expectation (internet, data, telephony, banking services).
Driving continuous improvement
Additionally, in the same way that organisations can benefit from applying the Kaizen principle of Continuous Improvement, ie, small, positive, incremental changes that yield compounding benefits over time – real-time analytics plays a powerful role in enabling organisations derive value in a similar way. It is because real-time analytics provides, or significantly contributes to, the information needed to identify the positive changes that drives the Kaizen principle.
There are many examples where real-time analytics plays a significant role. The golden thread centres on time and cost-savings. Ultimately, by doing things in less time or at a lower cost than expected or needed, business performance is improved.
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