If someone in the office started talking about Big Data and you said they have an awesome music video, this article is for you. While the business solutions aren’t as hip as the music video, Big Data and the business solutions that are being created in this business/technology solution category are a hot topic. If you still don’t know what we are talking about, please keep reading to find out more.
So it’s not a band, then what is it?
So it’s not a band, then what is it?Big Data and Advanced Analytics is relatively new category of business solutions that combines tools to process large amounts of structured or unstructured data with statistics and probability to predict outcomes that could happen in the future. This solution category is relatively new because many of the data sources used in these solutions couldn’t be processed by technology that was available 10, or even 5 years ago. As such, this solution category is new to many industries and it is often hard to envision how Big Data and Advanced Analytics can be used to help your business!
Top 6 Use Cases for Big Data Analytics
To help get the wheels churning in your head, here are a couple of example solutions that other firms have created to introduce real business value across the value chain.
- Marketing Promotional EffectivenessMeasuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign in the age of social media can be complex to say the least. The focus of many Big Data projects start from the CMO office. Tools are built to aggregate traditional ad effectiveness from sources like Nielsen, with measurement feeds from social media sources like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc… Blended together, the CMO can gain a complete picture of spend and effectiveness.
- GPS Data with Live Customers and Intelligent ApsGPS data from mobile applications can be used to create solutions that notify managers in real time when opt-in customers enter a store. The same data can be run through market basket predictive models that also notify managers of customer preferences and even sales promotions. http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/21/5129336/macys-apple-ibeacon-support-herald-union-square-stores-shopkick
- HR AnalyticsHuman Resources departments can create Big Data and Advanced Analytics solutions that ingest resumes and LinkedIn profiles to search for candidates using text patterns and predictive models that search for key candidate attributes. Here’s a quick video from our blog that shows how advanced analytics can be used for improving employee retention.
- Social Media Sentiment AnalysisNewer generations don’t complain to customer service, they go online and wreak havoc on a company’s reputation online. The focus of many Big Data solutions is to harvest social data and apply custom text analytics engines to understand customer sentiment. Many solutions are even real time to allow managers to fix issues as they come up. Our video below shows a quick example of how we can analyze comments from marketing surveys or feedback forms to slice and dice sentiment by type of attendee or event.
- Fleet management solutions with Telemetry data analysisMore and more companies are outfitting their corporate fleets with telemetry devices that measure vehicle speed, braking deceleration, vehicle temperature, tire pressure, and much more. This data can be streamed over the Web to centralized servers, so companies can create real time analytic solutions to monitor fleet distribution and issues. Taking it a step further, the same data can be used and pushed through predictive models to statistically predict machine failures. This allows operations to plan maintenance outages outside of critical operations windows. http://blogs.microsoft.com/iot/tag/predictive-maintenance
- Sensor Data in Manufacturing or OperationsManufacturers have always collected data from the plant floor, but historically there’s been too much of it coming in, too fast to do much with it. Using Big Data technologies, manufacturers are able to capture this massive amount of data in real time and put it to use in solutions that prevent downtime, control quality, or allow just-in-time inventory control.
Interested in learning more?
Hopefully the examples above have helped you think about how Big Data & Analytics can help you and your company. If you would like learn more or have an expert help you brainstorm how these and other use cases could be valuable for your company, contact 3Cloud today.
