A business that only deals with the past become history itself. Knowing about what’s happening in your business can provide you new opportunities that can help you and your business grow. And, getting to know the status of stores, warehouses and other departments in real-time is the cherry on top. Here’s how real-time analytics benefits businesses.
Real-time analytics
Real-time analytics is the process of preparing and measuring data as soon as it is registered in the database. This is helpful in drawing insights and preparing conclusions immediately after data is processed and collected.
Whenever a problem is recognized, a business acts on the problem instantly. With real-time analytics, businesses can react to data in real-time, so that the businesses can seize opportunities without any delay and prevent any disaster before it happens.
The insights gained through real-time analytics not only allow businesses to stay on top of the competition but also assist in significant improvement in productivity as well as the ROI.
Where can it be used
Every business across the industries can use real-time analytics depending upon the requirement that the business possesses. Some of the basic examples are as follows:
- Checking credit scores of borrowers in real-time can help financial institutions decide whether to extend credit or not.
- Measuring customer interaction through customer relationship management (CRM) in real-time analytics can help businesses measure the satisfaction level of customers and business returns when interacting with customers.
- Targeting individual customers of retail stores with promotions and incentives that attract customers to the store and interact with the merchandise.
- Detecting any fraudulent transaction taking place at point of sale.
Benefits of real-time analytics
Real-time analytics has been a boon to businesses in industries. Some of the benefits that real-time analytics provide are as follows:
Instant insights
With real-time analytics, there is no waiting as insights are provided on the spot. This is the most obvious benefit. When integrated with data collection software like enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM), a large amount of data is instantly collected, refined and visually processed.
In comparison to the manual process, collecting data, refining it and visualizing that data could have taken days and sometimes even weeks, just to show some meaningful insights.
Quick fine-tuning of processes
Keeping track of the production process has become the need of the hour. It can cause serious problems with customers, suppliers and stakeholders if things are not on time. With real-time analytics, organizations can identify any possible failures and successes without letting a problem in the process continue longer than its necessity.
Provide precise information
There are no wasted efforts with real-time analytics; it focuses on creating outcomes. With real-time analytics, a business is eliminating its efforts in spending resources, time and money in collecting data that is unnecessary. You are capturing data in real-time and making progress toward automation.
Make processes agile
As the insights are captured and managed in real-time, reports are to the point and appropriate. With the help of data management programs, real-time analytics assists in presenting data in a condensed and easy to analyze format.
Challenges with real-time analytics
Here’s some of the drawbacks of using real-time analytics.
Definition of real-time
The definition of “real-time” for a stakeholder of the business may differ as to what the employees of the company understand. Not everyone has the same understanding about “real-time.” When implementing real-time analytics, a business should ensure that the meaning of real-time remains the same and is according to their expectations.
System architecture
After everyone in the business is on the same track, their expectations and understanding about “real-time” is in tune, a new problem arises. The new problem revolves around the selection of the tool. The analytics tools have a major hand in the growth and size of the company. If the wrong tool is in use for the business, then there might be problems in the growth and scalability of the business.
Implementation
With the implementation of real-time analytics, there might be changes in the working structure and to implement real-time analytics businesses might need the assistance of an IT team or possess the technical know-how. Businesses can opt for any analytical tool where no code is required in the automation solution.
Conclusion
Implementing a real-time analytics tool into your business is very helpful in understanding the market need of a business. With so many benefits, it is understandable that automation and getting precise information have become the new trend in the business.
Businesses should remember, when taking decisions related to analytics, it is suggested to check whether the selected tool would not be a stoppage in the business operation, but instead act as an assistant in the growth and scalability of the business.
