LASA 2—Business Analytics Implementation Plan Part 2You began writing your business analytics implementation plan in Module 3. In addition, you already have gained information about the various tech

Jessica Poindexter

MGT 334

Teresa Dillard

Table of contents

Smart Design Company is a strategic design firm that is determined to help people have better and quality living standards and work smarter. The main objective of the firm is to increase its clients and customer’s innovative and competitive qualities. The firm produces powerful products and experiences to the world in the competitive political market. The firm is located in New York and London and has client all over the world.

Smart Design Company has a very good technology in place and they have been utilizing this technology in their day to day operations successfully. However, the firm has not utilized this precious technology in place especially in analysis of data to help the firm’s top management in making sound and information based decisions. Though collection of data when it comes to business analytics is not only reserved for the top ranking managers in the organization, this activity also involves the whole team in the decision making process to ensure decision accuracy (Chen, H., Chiang, & Storey, 2012).

When it comes to decision making, a fast and information based decision is what makes a company remain in the competitive market. Business analytics is one of the best tools that the firm can implement and can help it stay at the top of the competitive political market. Making business analytics a part of the firm’s culture is a very important move towards success. Moreover, making the reports from business analytics available for all the employee in the firm will help them get a clear idea of what the firm’s goals are (Ragsdale, 2014).

Business analytics is an important tool in growth, development and marketability of businesses, companies and organizations. Smart Design Company being a firm that has great experience in design and business analysis skills, business analytics is an essential element for its profitable and successful businesses investments. A major aspect of business analytic techniques is that it is an ever evolving implementation plan. Business analytics involves practices, techniques, applications, skills as well as technologies that understands and are useful in analyzing the firm’s performance for it to achieve better results and strategic goal (Ragsdale, 2014).

Additionally, business analytics is not universal in its approach and most of the firms do not use it in the same manner and effect. Therefore, the Smart Design firm can develop and create a strategy such that they do not only achieve their intended results but also increase their brand power and profit in a successful manner. The firm therefore will have a unique way of implementing the analytic plan to see that they realize both their internal as well as external goals in a comprehensive manner. Business analytic process will remain to be an integral part of business marketing plan as the tools employed are decisive though brand can reach a much wider market in a successful and cost-effective way (Rezaie, Mirabedini, & Abtahi, 2017).

Industries and small business firms are growing at a rapid pace. Firms and organizations business analytics therefore believe that the field of big analytics are posed for great change. With the technological development that the current world is experiencing, companies are opening their eyes in the field of analytics. This is because of the package that comes with this advanced and more technical field. Some of the benefits of business analytics which has changed the faces of businesses that have implemented it are as listed below (Sharma, Mithas, & Kankanhalli, 2014).

• Business analytics has helped the business firms change their functioning by helping them to take more strategic decisions that has overreaching implications.

• Today, the industrial field is growing rapidly in size and thus creating a dent in the market is becoming a challenging task. Business analytic is therefore becoming one of the important ingredient in the sustainability of the firm’s positions in the political market.

• With faster processing time and intuitively designed database, business analytics has been helping firms to address challenges and make use of opportunities as they emerge.

Though business analytics has given both large and small business firms an edge for years by helping them to become more competitive in the political market as well as make information based decisions faster, business analytics has disadvantaged some of the firms in their attempt to implement it. Some of the disadvantages of business analytics are:

• Implementation of the plan are very costly. Economic conditions of the organizations and firms has seen most of the business analytic projects on hold. The cost of purchasing the devices and installation of programs to run business analytic processes are very high. Moreover, the implementation of the plan as well as personnel costs are very high.

• Lack of staff and expertise. Most of business analytics requires professionals to run the analytic processes and implement it which most of the firm lack. Moreover additional staffs with business analytic skills would incur additional employee expenses including salary and other costs. The firm here can just hire one professional personnel to run the process since we have software that run the process fast even with large amount of data to be analyzed

• Lack of enough data to get useful results. For small firms, it is difficult to get enough data that could provide useful results that could help the firm in making information based decisions for the firm to grow. However, some of the analytic tools are very powerful such that they are capable of determining what data has usable value and the ones that does not. Therefore the firm can go for powerful analytic tools to overcome this problem (Sharma, Mithas, & Kankanhalli, 2014).

Quality of data is one of the challenge of business analytics. This is because enough data is needed to provide enough information to help in information based decision making. Small and useless data provides poor or disadvantageous results. On the other hand, business analytic personnel waste a lot of time and resources trying to find perfect data for analysis. High quality data analytic tools provides a lasting solutions for this challenge. This is because they are capable of optimizing data selection for the business and determine which data are useful and which ones are not.

The volume of data the firms are experiencing today is very big. This has posed a big challenge to business firms due to the big data trend. However, making use of data fully and maximizing the usage of analytic tools available, firms can actually slow down the data more than the data itself. This is because if used appropriately, analytics dictates that users or business analysts should allow the solutions to execute themselves in the analytic software. Moreover this freedom will reduce the complexity of the results generated without altering the power of the useful analytic tools available.

Though analytic solutions are known to take complex models and provide easy to understand results from them, firms face challenges in developing their model and expect too much from the tools used. This complex models slows down the actual use of the report to be generated from the model. However, using top down modeling approach can increase or maximize the results generated from these complex models and on the other hand reduce the time the analytic tools take to execute the results optimizing the overall workflow.

Another challenge analytic poses to business firms is that of the developed model usability. Scientifically, the model developed by the companies in their attempt to solve existing problems should be able to be put in use for practice purposes and not just generating reports. This focus will enable the models to reduce complexity and optimize the useful recommendations as per the results generated from analytics. Therefore it is important to focus on the firm’s own and realistic data to generate useful results and trust the analytic tools they are using in minimizing the existing risks (Sharma, Mithas, & Kankanhalli, 2014).

1. Descriptive analytics: This involves the use of basic statistics, exploratory data analysis and data visualization. This technique is all about taking the collected business or firm data analyzing it using the available analytic tools and summarizing the data to gain the information about the problem under investigation. It is from the result of the analytics that the analysts make informed statements or reports about the status of the company at any given moment.

2. Predictive analytics: This technique allows businesses analysts to use the analyzed data to predict the future events or outcomes of the business firm for every product and service in every seasonal period. One of the main goal of this technique is to help the business analytics build a framework that they can retain and use in the future as thy bump into different problems in their businesses

3. Simulation: This type of analytic technique deals with uncertainty and risks in the firm. This technique is useful in that, it can help the firm analyze the risk and uncertainties within the firm which may slows the production and provision of services. For example, the firm can use this analytic technique to determine the employee health care cost in the firm during the year or a period when individual illness or accidents are uncertain. This will help the firm visualize how simulation can be used in the real world to determine real consequences. Therefore, it is important for the firm to understand how simulation tool can be utilized in a business setting.

4. Optimization: This is one of the best analytic technique especially in analyzing how the firm will allocate resources in their different investments. Apart from the normal ways that business firms allocate their resources, business analytics provides tools that firms can easily allocate resources without loss. These analytic tools includes stochastic mixed integer program which can be used in determination of the optimal resource allocation for the firm.

All the analytic techniques are very useful in the field of business. They have got the power to maximize the profit and reduce complex and chronic data analyses problems within the firms. Therefore, if the Smart Design Company would adopt business analytics the firm would just taste the powerful use of analytic tools especially if placed in the hands of business professionals who have been taught their true worth.

A firm defined by data driven strategies need to apply quantitative data results to future business. For the firm to improve on its productivity or on marketing returns on its investments, business analytics platform will provide the firm with web based applications for continuous monitoring and metric measurement of activities. Therefore, business analytics are good metrics which the firm can use in monitoring, capturing and analyzing operations performance and reporting. Therefore it is advisable to first identify the business problem to begin analytic processes.

The firm should be very careful while choosing the metric and analysis technique to employ in the study and should align with the analytic process. For example optimization is a common technique that the firm can employ in allocation of resources and digital marketing is a common technique used in measuring operations returns on the firm’s investments.

After identifying the business problem and the technique to be used in the study, the process of data collection now begins. Internal enterprise systems supported by database tracking of inventory and process efficiency offer data collection as well as tools for reporting. Depending on the kind of marketing platform that the firm relies on reporting metrics are available for data collection. The use of business analytic reporting is essential to measure the existing productivity in order to monitor digital marketing campaign.

Results in business analytics depend on application of insight in comparative testing. Analytic tools are available to offer analytic capabilities for analyzing the collected data, present graphical illustrations, econometric modeling of optimal allocation of resources and prizing, analyses of trends, risk deviation as well as regression analysis to strategic decisions for the design firm.

After the collected data has been analyzed by the use of an appropriate analytic technique and tools, the business analyst professionals present the findings which the firm can use to turn its operations into highly effective and profitable multi-scale operations. Moreover, the results and the findings can guide the managers into making information based decisions (Rezaie, Mirabedini, & Abtahi, 2017).

In conclusion business analytics is a very crucial ingredient of a successful firm in the market. As discussed above companies have opened their eyes on the field of business analytics in order to remain top in the competitive political market. In decision making process, business analytics plays an important role. This is because, business analytics will empower managers with precious information that is crucial for the whole decision making process and vital for reaching the goal of the Design Firm. Therefore, a well implemented business analytic plan will make sure that all the data in the firm are structured, valuable and easy to understand and interpret.

Chen, H., Chiang, R. H., & Storey, V. C. (2012). Business intelligence and analytics: from big data to big impact. MIS quarterly, 1165-1188.

Ragsdale, C. (2014). Spreadsheet modeling and decision analysis: A practical introduction to business analytics. Nelson Education.

Rezaie, S., Mirabedini, S. J., & Abtahi, A. (2017). Identifying key effective factors on the implementation process of business intelligence in the banking industry of Iran. Journal of Intelligence Studies in Business, 7(3).

Sharma, R., Mithas, S., & Kankanhalli, A. (2014). Transforming decision-making processes: a research agenda for understanding the impact of business analytics on organisations.