In this data-driven world, enterprises are dependent on humongous quantities of data that are subsequently analysed to uncover trends previously hidden and to carry out business functions. New tools, techniques, and technologies like those of Business Intelligence, Advanced Analytics, Machine Learning are used to analyse data and devise insights-informed strategies.

Also, they help entrepreneurs by guiding them to plan day-to-day operations, ensure fast and accurate reporting, increase revenue, identify new revenue streams, identify revenue leakage…the list is virtually endless.

Gartner explains Advanced Analytics as an autonomous or semi-autonomous examination of data or content using sophisticated techniques and tools to discover deeper insights, make predictions, or generate recommendations. It uses Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Predictive Analytics, Data Visualisations, and Text Mining to examine large data sets.

In fact, Advanced Analytics is generally comprised of two divisions:

• Predictive Analytics
• Prescriptive Analytics

Predictive Analytics: What might happen in the future

Predictive Analysis is the third and most critical process of Advanced Analytics. It uses techniques like artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, modelling, and statistics to make predictions. Predictive modelling helps businesses like healthcare, marketing, sales, supply chain etc. to optimize operations, improve customer satisfaction, manage budgets, identify new markets, anticipate the impact of external events, develop new products and set business, marketing and pricing strategies.

Prescriptive Analytics: What should be done

Prescriptive analytics is a vital tool used in creating data-driven decisions. optimizing operations, growing sales, managing risks formulating strategies, and reaching organizational goals. It uses statistics and modelling to recommend future actions by applying data to the decision-making process.

Advanced Analytics and Business Intelligence Market Size

The Advanced Analytics market is showing continual progress as enterprises embrace these tools to effectively manage complex business processes. Reportlinker.com predicts that the global Advanced Analytics market size may grow from USD 33.8 billion in 2021 to USD 89.8 billion by 2026, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.6%.

A similar trend can be noticed in the case of the Business Intelligence market too. To quote Fortune Business Insights, “the Business Intelligence market is set to reach USD 43.03 Billion by 2028 in connection with rapid digitisation and robust demand for data personalisation to foster market development”.

Business Intelligence

Advanced Analytics is all about predicting future strategies, whereas Business Intelligence is focused on past performance, relying on methods such as querying, reporting, and dashboards. It uncovers trends and presents findings through visualization tools. The results show that companies adopt new approaches to increase operational efficiency and improve sales and customer relations through real-time analysis.

Functions of Business Intelligence are listed below:


Data Mining


Data mining is the process of unearthing information and patterns from massive datasets to visualizing in dashboards to generate inferences to assist the decision-making process. By adopting various techniques and procedures, knowledge is extracted to solve business problems to promote sales and marketing.

Process Mining

Powered by Data Mining and Power Analytics, Process Mining extracts insights from the existing data and helps to find the bottlenecks that hinder efficiency and compliance. It ensures a better customer experience, loT process improvement, identifies and analyses supply chain management weak links, optimises procurement and speed-up payment collection.

Complex Event Processing

CEP employs a set of techniques to analyse Big Data for real-time benefits. Opportunities and threats in business operations are identified and monitored to pave the way to success. Companies adopt CEP for fraud prevention and detection, real-time marketing, stock market trading and allied areas.

Business Performance Management

Widely known as Corporate Performance Management (CPM), BPM implies all processes or methodologies that optimise business performance. It also initiates the achievement of business goals like budgeting, planning, and forecasting and helps to improve employee performance. It identifies risks, selection of goals for progressive development, and streamlines financial processes.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking process is evaluating the management practices of one company with its best counterpart. Comparing the organisational processes in relation to the best performances allows companies to evolve by developing plans to improve their tactics.

Top 5 Advanced Analytics Tools

Alteryx: A self-service platform that can help users extract, clean and analyse data through an automated process.

Anaconda: It is an open-source Python and R-focussed platform to analyse and visualise data.

Google Cloud Platform: Known to be one of the enormous machine learning stacks, Google Cloud AI offers many products to analyse and manage data in real-time.

Knime: An open-source software that visualises data flows and helps discover new insights with minimal or no programming.

MS Azure: It is a platform (PaaS) that combines data from various sources, then stores and finally transforms it for different purposes.

Top 5 Business Intelligence Tools

Tableau: Tableau supports multiple data sources to easily analyse and visualise data in handy dashboards.

Power BI: This business analytics tool which can be accessed from anywhere helps in identifying real-time trends and delivering reports via real-time dashboards.

Qlik sense: It is a popular and complete Business Intelligence tool with its unique search and conversational analytics platform that discover new observations using natural language.

Micro strategy: It offers high speed and powerful dashboarding, cloud solutions and hyper-intelligence that can be accessed from a laptop or mobile.

IBM Cognos Analytics: Designed to discover even hidden patterns, Cognos Analytics interprets and presents data in a visualised pattern.

Conclusion

Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics go hand in hand, from assisting business operations to improving customer satisfaction. Yet they are distinct from each other in their own ways. The amalgamation of these two technologies – Advanced Analytics and BI – improves the efficiency of business operations, delivering predictions based on historical and present data and enhancing performance in sales, maintenance, and customer satisfaction.