Your company should track and apply analytics to several statistics, such as sales, employee performance and market trends. These statistics can yield a variety of reports to help you spot where your business needs improvements and plan goals to implement those changes. The four types of analytics that you can use to get the most from your statistics are descriptive, diagnostic, prescriptive and predictive. Hiring a data analytic professional, either in-house or outsourced, is the most effective way to generate and use this type of information.

Descriptive

Descriptive analytics most literally describes the data sets you are looking at. When you use descriptive analytics on your business statistics, you report what happened when the data was gathered. For instance, applying descriptive analytics to your monthly statements will tell you how many sales you made during the last month, which departments met benchmarks during that time and the market snapshot for the month. These descriptions are what most people think of when hearing the term “quarterly reports.” Still, a quality business report will use descriptive analytics as a jumping-off point for the other three analytical types. Most data analysts will suggest using more than one type of analytics for the best and most comprehensive business planning.

Diagnostic

First, descriptive analytics gives you a picture of what happened. Then a diagnostic analysis will tell you why it happened by diving deeper and making more connections between data patterns. This type of analytics is beneficial if you are trying to pinpoint where and why your company is underperforming so you can improve those areas more effectively. For instance, if you have a logistics company and are trying to streamline your processes, then descriptive analytics can tell you that the bottleneck is in your scheduling and diagnostic analysis can show you that you need a computer upgrade to keep up with your client management software. Diagnostic reports are a necessary second step for descriptive reports because they offer context to the issues and areas to focus on with solutions.

Prescriptive

This type of analytics will give you a blueprint to help you get from where you are to where you want to be by using the other types of analytics to visualize market changes and trends, pinpoint where your company is struggling and formulate a plan to move forward successfully. This is one of the most valuable and complex ways to use analytics, as it often requires reports of the other three types to build on. For instance, you can use descriptive analytics to describe a sales slump, diagnostic reports to pinpoint an underperforming marketing campaign, predictive to show likely outcomes of changing nothing, and prescriptive analysis to represent the best path forward. When you use this type of analytics to prepare for board meetings, you will be able to present the most comprehensive picture of the company and propose various quality solutions for the next quarter.

Predictive

Predictive analytics tells you what is likely to occur based on what has happened in the past. In most cases, this type of analytics will build on descriptive and diagnostic reports of past trends to project the most likely outcome, allowing you to see what is expected to happen if you continue your current course. You can then use prescriptive reports to suggest courses of action that will lead to better predictive outcomes. While most of these reports can be generated with the right data sets and machine learning, having a data analytics professional help gather, clean and structure the data sets and reports is more effective.

Using various forms of analytics to examine data sets and use business stats can help you grow your company successfully. You can find help with analytics from professional firms that can gather and prepare relevant data from various sources and then perform multiple types of analytics for your company. The reports generated by analytical types can be descriptive, diagnostic, predictive or prescriptive, but it is advised to use all four to generate the most comprehensive quarterly reports possible.

The technology that your business relies on serves many important objectives. Make sure that you are equipping your business with the tools that you need to optimize, safeguard, and grow your operations.

Data Management and Analysis Solutions

Businesses have to create strong technological infrastructure, and they need the right set of tools to make the most of the data-driven resources that they’re building. Likewise, having the right instruments to monitor data metrics is fundamental to their ability to measure performance and effectiveness. 

Using PromQL tools to extrapolate and interpret data from Prometheus data sets can give you a detailed snapshot of data metrics. You can customize queries with narrowly defined parameters to retrieve and synthesize large volumes of information. Whether you want to analyze activity over the course of a large or small span of time, using this querying language gives you a way to illustrate results graphically or numerically. 

Studying detailed query results could give you key insights on optimizing performance. Applying findings from these types of queries, you will know right where to start when you need to go about making modifications. In effect, this tool can save time and resources when you’re troubleshooting, upgrading, or integrating various processes.

Cybersecurity Safeguards

Cyberthreats against businesses in virtually every sector have been on the rise. Many of the most newsworthy breaches involved large volumes of customer data, but that certainly isn’t the only thing that cyber criminals are after. Infiltrating a company’s operating systems or stored data puts them in a position to do irreparable damage. Ransomware attacks against businesses is a pernicious problem that merits a high level of vigilance. 

Work with your team to identify cybersecurity management resources that will give you continuous, comprehensive protection. Establish policies to ensure that your security protocols are current, and assign responsibility to specific team members. 

Being proactive about cyber threats could spare you from a lot of grief. In addition to interrupting your regular activities, the fallout from a breach can have an enduring effect on customer engagement. In addition to preventive safeguards, set contingency measures in place. Using monitoring tools that alerts your team to breaches in real-time facilitates a swift response. Acting quickly could significantly mitigate the damage resulting from unauthorized access to your data.

It may also be prudent to add cyber liability coverage to your commercial insurance indorsements. Even if you’ve hired a third-party cybersecurity management service provider to handle your data management, your company could still be liable for a breach. Moreover, that provider’s data, systems, and financial information is on the line. Yours is. You should also be aware, however, that the cost of cyber liability insurance coverage has been steadily increasing because of the growing number and cost of claims. Weigh the practical advantages of coverages judiciously, and shop competitively from multiple carriers to find the best rates available. 

Workflow Management

Your staff’s time is one of your business’ most valuable resources. If team members have to spend too long on individual tasks or they are continually duplicating one another’s efforts to complete a single task, it really undermines productivity. Communication breakdowns and other hindrances to effective coordination between different team members or departments may also slow down workflows. When these problems persist, job performance as well as quality assurance and customer satisfaction are all in jeopardy.

Give your team a centralized platform to manage their workflow. These organizational tools can fast track every collaborative effort and enable you to maintain consistency in task management processes. When someone completes a task, a platform may automatically generate a notification to other team members that prompt them to take over to do their part. 

One great advantage of these platforms for supervisors is that it gives them a way to track efficiency. With a workflow management solution, managers can quickly learn the status of individual project items and oversee ongoing functions.  

Investing in innovative technology can make all of your primary goals more attainable. It will also make your business more adaptable and better-equipped for growth.