Is your Data Analytics Strategy Tuned to the New Normal?

By Ajay Aggarwal , Head, Retail, Nihilent Limited

The pandemic has strained businesses globally. During any such crisis, resilience is measured by how a business responds and how quickly it can adapt, and build safeguards going forward.

NEED FOR A RADICAL NEW APPROACH

Traditionally, businesses have been using data analytics in decision making for running their business and over time and through the experience they have learned to improve their ability to respond to such events and find solutions. The use of AI/ ML methods has been discussed to improve their ability to enhance intelligence in running these businesses.

As enterprises are moving towards the trajectory of recovery and future growth in ‘new normal’, their ability to make good and timely decisions will be very critical. More than ever, most businesses are striving to make data and analytics a centerpiece of their culture and way of doing business.

AI/ML-driven data models shall enable enterprises to objectively evaluate multiple business situations, such as how to manage uncertain supply and demand, assess and mitigate supplier risk, adjust to disruptions in operations and supply chain, and adapt to sharp changes in consumer buying behavior, confidence, and priorities. On the other hand, the ability to maintain the security and integrity of enterprise data will also become crucial since most enterprises are in a remote working model.

A SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH

Enterprises are moving towards achieving the nirvana of “Single view of supply chain and a single view of their customers”. These two objectives are tightly integrated into the context of post-pandemic business needs.

Consumers are spending more and more of their daily lives online; social media is influencing their choices and their newly found value-driven buying criteria is setting new trends. Recent buying pattern is more influencing than the historic trends. ML and advanced data & analytics will come into play to detect new consumption patterns and deliver hyper-personalized products and services. This should be part of your organization’s long-term approach, ensuring you can analyze data at scale to unlock the true value of it and operate in an agile manner with the right supporting IT infrastructure—most likely cloud-based.

As businesses are shifting toward recovery, most of these will need to ramp up their deployment of AI-enabled business solutions to boost revenue and renew top-line growth. AI and ML provide the ability to analyze data from vast numbers of sources that can discover emerging trends and anticipate potential future shocks.

Analyzing immense volumes of data to learn underlying patterns, enables you to make complex decisions and predict human behavior, among many other things. AI/ML-enabled systems also continuously learn and adapt, which means these can optimize the insights and predictions delivered over time.

Now is the time to push the boundaries of what’s possible with data at every step of your post-pandemic strategy to ensure you emerge ready for future profitable growth.