Analytical Applications

Supply chain analytics, customer analytics, operations analytics…the possibilities are many and limited more by organizational factors than by what the technology can deliver. The key question is, what analytical applications does your company need? We explore this question in our new book, The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence, and a sample list of analytical subjects and techniques includes:

Analytical Subjects:

• Customer analysis
• Product analysis
• Productivity analysis
• Quality analysis
• Risk analysis (fraud detection, loss analysis, litigation)
• Inventory analysis
• Financial analysis (revenue, profit, cost, accounts receivable)
• Channel analysis
• Supply chain analysis
• Sales analysis

Analytical Techniques:

• Aging
• Alerters (out of range detection)
• Benchmarking
• Data mining
• Decision trees and expected monetary value
• Decomposition
• Descriptive statistics
• Forecasting
• Linear programming
• Linear regression
• Mixed integer programming
• Modeling
• Optimization
• Performance measures and metrics
• Probability analysis
• Simulation
• Statistical inference
• Summarization
• Time series analysis
• Trend analysis
• Variance analysis

Selecting the relevant business information and analyses for your company can be done in a structured way by employing DecisionPath’s BI Opportunity Analysis method and our industry-leading BI Requirements Analysis approach. Using these techniques allows companies to focus on the what and why of BI, setting the stage for developing custom-designed analytical applications that precisely leverage the capabilities of proven BI tools to improve core business processes that make a difference in profits and performance.