Understanding the Basics of Operational Analytics

Operational analytics makes it possible for data to be made available across multiple groups within an organization by moving the data into the native tools of the end-users, establishing a singular location for information across the entirety of the organization.

By implementing operational analytics, employees can access the most recent updated versions of data, making it easier to work in unison to contribute to the aligned effort towards the same ambition, to make their organization’s continued success a reality. 

Since operational analytics is a crucial component to ERP (enterprise resource planning), let’s establish a basic understanding of how operational analytics operates and is being used in the business world.

By definition, operational analytics is a term frequently used in business analytics that applies to the measurement of existing and real-time operations of a business. By utilizing tools created for data mining and data aggregation, companies can benefit from improving their decision-making due to the transparency that operational analytics makes possible. 

With the power of real-time reporting and actionable analytics, accessing real-time data provides a clear window into business processes and customer behaviors that keep companies up to date on where to shift and make adjustments in sales, marketing, production, and employee engagement, to list a few. 

Having the most current data provides a quick overview of what the day-to-day operations are looking like. But, let’s not forget, the faster adjustments can be made, the more satisfied customers will be with their experience with a product or service.

Operational analytics allows users to fuel each decision being made with data to prioritize products, messages, clients, employees, and events with justifiable reasoning instead of gambling on guesses. 

1. Operational analytics in business 

Operational analytics is closely associated with management science, using statistical analysis for fact-based management and predictive modeling to drive decision-making. With this level of analytics in tow, fully automated decisions can occur and management decisions stemming from the input being provided. 

Business intelligence requires alert tools like reporting, querying, push “alerts” in real-time, and online analytical processing (OLAP). Operational analytics can respond to crucial questions such as the type of problems that have occurred, the location of these problems, how many times that these problems occurred, and the solution to get the issues fixed. 

Then there is also the ability to predict what will happen next and what could transpire later on down the line. 

2. Banks with operational analytics

The way banks can use operational analytics is to determine the economic situations of their customers based on variables such as credit risk and usage. Then these data characteristics are used to match customers with appropriate banking product offerings. 

Banks also benefit from using operational analytics for running fraud across ATMs and banking cards, arriving at split-second answers from transactional data to improve fraud detection, and running digital marketing algorithms against endless daily transactions. Troubleshooting using generated data from an application environment to quickly see the cause of an issue is helpful in most businesses. 

3. Manufacturing with operational analytics 

Operational analytics is used in the manufacturing field to stimulate preventive maintenance to determine potential problems before they even have a chance to occur. Manufacturing clients can also utilize sales analytics for product and customer performance management and inventory analysis for stock control.

4. Additional use cases for operational analytics 

Having the ability to visualize the application environment to prioritize opportunities and issues alike and analyze the impact, they will have on the business is valuable to keep the company operating as efficiently as possible and to create action plans once the data is made available. In addition, this is a method of quantifying the value of the work put in by operations professionals to ensure application environments operate as effortlessly as possible.

Operational data sync data between multiple systems to communicate with users, notify employees, and bill customers while being flexible enough to automate numerous business activities to reduce mistakes.

Analytics in the past would typically focus on providing an overview understanding of a business and then turn around and use that information to make decisions. Many difficulties occurred because those decisions had to be turned into actionable steps, leaving that knowledge to end up as nothing but data. The contemporary usage of operational analytics makes it possible to move forward in directions to get desired results.