What Are the Different Types of Business Analysis Tools?

Business analysis refers to examining the estimated sales, costs, and profits of new products in order to find out whether they meet the company's goals. ^[1]

Business analysis

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Business analysis refers to examining the estimated sales, costs, and profits of new products in order to find out whether they meet the company's goals. ^[1]

According to the latest IBM research, companies that invest in business analytics have better business insights and can better manage business performance. Compared with similar companies, these companies have increased their profits by 33%, increased their profits by 12 times, and increased their return on investment by 32%.

Business analysis is a series of short-term strategic and tactical agreements. It can provide organizations with rapid assessments and roadmaps to help organizations identify opportunities and plan transformation paths to achieve their analytical initiatives and goals. Business analysis can help organizations open new ways to realize value and competitive advantage through analysis. These short-term service activities include:

Use interviews and seminar-based approaches to help identify and prioritize areas where analysis can be used to solve problems.

Assess core competencies and competitiveness and the readiness of the organization to implement analysis.

Provide roadmaps and actionable recommendations to achieve business goals.

Accelerate the process of realizing value and increase the possibility of transformation.

In the era of big data, enterprises face many problems. Lack of available information; Unstructured data cannot be analyzed quickly and efficiently; Large amounts of data are ignored, mishandled, or underutilized. Many companies are relying on incomplete or untrusted information to make important decisions. Business analytics can effectively change this situation.

Business analytics can help companies build capabilities in business analysis and optimization strategies, business intelligence and performance management, advanced analysis and optimization, enterprise information management, and enterprise content management, so that they can identify key market models, reduce costs, and increase utilization efficiency Proactively manage risks to achieve intelligent, high-profit growth. And help companies predict results more accurately, find previously unforeseen business opportunities, and implement them across the enterprise at a functional level.

Business analytics can produce automated reports

IBM Cognos FSR provides a comprehensive solution for external reporting requirements for all businesses, it automatically creates annual reports, quarterly reports, bank financial reports, corporate actions,

SME business analysis path

General use for SMEs

The business planning process (planning-budgeting-forecasting-reporting) is a huge challenge for many companies. Enterprise planning is a key component of performance management, and it plays a significant role in the overall success or failure of the enterprise.

Adopt new business analytics technologies and develop proven planning and forecasting best practices. Companies will soon be rewarded by more accurate planning, more timely forecasts, and more effective decisions. Business analysis tools save time, reduce errors, promote enterprise-wide collaboration, and form a rigorous financial management culture that helps to achieve a true competitive advantage and ensure that the company has a leading or solid position in the market . By matching a company's planning process with identified best practices, complemented by the correct implementation of planning solutions, companies can significantly improve their financial and operational performance. At the very least, visibility into performance gaps and alternative actions, reliable forecasts, and commitments to achieve goals is achieved.

manufacturing

Industrial Demand Planning Blueprint

Demand planning is the starting point for any effective supply chain. Manufacturers are often under pressure to increase customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs. In an environment where companies are vying to retain and win customers, it becomes even more important to adjust business to customer needs. Enterprises can drive demand by establishing demand planning practices and then using demand planning to manage their business.

The process of demand planning involves a range of activities from data collection and statistical analysis to building consensus in customer, sales, operations, and finance. The analysis of historical sales data, business experience, and the use of statistical time-series techniques are the basis for generating basic forecasts. New product launches and promotion plans will also affect unit growth in basic demand planning. Then, use the average sales price and promotional price to turn the overall unit demand plan into a revenue plan.

It is worth noting that many companies use silo data and rely on spreadsheets that are disconnected from business, corporate, and financial goals to effectively manage their demand planning. This often results in inconsistent plans, numerous errors, excessive inventory, reduced customer service levels, and inability to respond quickly to changing customer needs.

The IBM Cognos Demand Planning Performance Blueprint can help companies build demand planning models so that organizations can address demand issues that impact overall corporate goals. Using demand planning blueprints, planners can use product category or series rollups to view baseline forecasts for the current year, as well as forecasts for the previous year and actual figures year-to-date by project level. Blueprints can dynamically re-forecast demand for multiple scenarios, and you can immediately see the effects of unit demand planning on inventory levels and revenue indicators. The blueprint can also help companies achieve:

Develop product and category-level units and revenue performance indicators.

Introduce and plan new product volumes.

Perform bottom-up planning, including unit planning by SKU, customer, location, and week.

· SKU-level planning by attributes (for example, color and size).

Review and analyze plans by unit and revenue.

Adjust top-down and bottom-up plans.

Utilize multi-dimensional views of various planning versions to create consistent demand planning.

Plan and analyze gross profit and the root cause of profit or loss.

· Monitor performance (planned and actual).

Perform deviation analysis (price, volume, and profit).

Calculate the standard deviation and determine the confidence of the forecast.

Perform ABCD analysis to help determine supply strategy.

Whether in a depression, recovery, or strong economy, manufacturers must remain efficient to meet market, production, and supply needs. Costs and resources must also be managed wisely. Therefore, enterprises need to use IT technology to redesign the decision-making process so that managers can understand the business situation and everyone can make informed decisions.

Method One: Smart Supply Chain

Global supply chains have huge potential for production, cost management and efficiency. However, to properly arrange the supply chain, it is not enough to be proficient in logistics, but also to achieve intelligent collaboration in the supply chain.

Method 2: Higher operational efficiency

Manufacturers must respond to market trends and economic challenges by strengthening internal operations to ensure that the entire enterprise operates at the highest efficiency. This requires the company to have a deep understanding of the company's current operating situation and its historical development trends, as well as the overall market situation. To understand these things, companies need to be able to combine operational details with business drivers.

Method 3: Reliable financial planning

Eliminate inefficient processes and adopt new systems to promote improved current performance. Companies need to adjust their financial forecasts based on key business cycles in key markets. This becomes even more important. By eliminating the rigid annual budget process, ensuring that companies continue to plan on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis can help companies achieve high performance regardless of the time.

Industrial companies use sales analytics to improve sales operations plans

For industrial companies, understanding and meeting customer needs and achieving optimal operational efficiency requires effective sales and operations planning (S & OP). However, many industrial companies still use siloed departmental silos to manage S & OP processes, resulting in different goals and inconsistent planning for the marketing, sales, and production teams, unable to respond quickly to changing customer trends.

In a highly competitive global economy, companies can't afford this poor performance. The entire business must work together to ensure that sales demand is profitable when production capacity allows. Enterprises need to actively monitor sales and operation processes and use a common integrated planning process to guide their business decisions and results. In this way, we can always understand customer needs and adapt and evolve quickly when needs and challenges arise.

IBMCognos Business Analytics provides the necessary foundation for sales and operations management in industrial sector organizations. Help industrial companies adjust procurement, production, operations, sales, marketing and financial processes; coordinate sales and supply forecasts based on supply chain and production plans; standardize planning processes, integrate plans, and plan for top-down and bottom-up operations Agree among them to ensure that all business units have agreed financial metrics and business goals.

Blueprint for retail store operation (profit and loss) planning performance

Today's consumers are adept at using tools and technologies to get instant access to information about retailers, products and other consumer experiences. They connect with each other and use multiple technologies to interact with other consumers and retailers. Consumers have more shopping options, which plays a vital role in providing retailers with a differentiated and high-quality shopping experience. Therefore, providing a great shopping experience while increasing sales and protecting profits is the balance for retailers.

Ineffective planning can cause a disconnect between store operations and business plans in terms of market share, development, and customer satisfaction. May lead to lower profits, lower sales and lower consumer satisfaction. To help retailers get on track and achieve better store performance, IBM has introduced a blueprint for IBM Cognos store operation (profit and loss) planning performance backed by TML. The IBM Cognos Performance Blueprint provides a pre-built performance management framework that includes planning, metrics, and reporting that enables retailers to plan to improve the store-level customer experience, drive sales, and increase profits. Based on industry best practices, the blueprint goes beyond corporate finance to extend the planning process to operations, marketing, and sales in an effort to achieve the same set of financial indicators and business goals. It helps retailers complete store-level revenue and expenditure planning, ensuring that store plans are aligned with corporate goals.

Telecom industry business analysis

IBM business analytics solutions enable telecommunications service providers to make better use of the vast amounts of information to make smarter decisions and correlate top-level strategies with departmental plans. Helping telecom operators:

Predict and prevent user churn while attracting new customers.

IBM Churn Prediction Analytics helps communication service providers take full advantage of business intelligence and predictive analytics to identify potential customers who may be lost days or weeks before they may leave, thereby retaining and nurturing high-value users.

· Using dashboards and scorecards to analyze financial and operational performance

IBM business analytics software can provide this information by automating all of the company's core financial processes, including: budgeting, planning, integration, forecasting, and reporting, and businesses no longer need to rely on error-prone spreadsheet analysis.

Leverage dashboards and alerts to optimize customer service and call center operations

IBM business analytics software enables customer service and call center managers to measure and analyze key metrics to improve business operations. The efficiency of call centers has been improved, customer satisfaction has continued to increase, issues have been consistently identified and resolved earlier, and service levels and response times have been continuously optimized.

Analyze cross-platform advertising performance to drive new revenue streams

IBM business analytics software enables service providers to effectively measure advertising effectiveness and enables telecommunications operators to record the value that the network generates to advertising agencies and corporate customers.

Improve asset utilization and optimize related labor costs

IBM business analytics software can help companies monitor the health and productivity of infrastructure equipment.

Optimize operations through information-led change

BM's Information Agenda approach is an industry-specific approach to defining and enabling information-led change. With a proven track record of helping network operators respond quickly and adapt to unpredictable, up-to-date business changes, it will help companies develop customized roadmaps in weeks.

Business analysis helps National Grid to optimize human resources

State Grid has branches throughout the country, with more than 1 million employees and a wide geographical distribution, resulting in inconvenient information communication. At the same time, the huge number of data reports caused the personnel department's energy to be heavily involved, and the numerous dimensions made the work extremely difficult. In addition, due to the large number of branches, problems such as difficult human resource planning and long coordination cycles, high cost of operational effect evaluation, and poor accuracy were caused.

Since the end of 2010, State Grid has adopted Cognos TM1 for its comprehensive development and application of its human resources system. The situation of the HR team staying up late at the end of the year has completely disappeared, and the work becomes simple and easy. IBM Cognos TM1 provides a unified and complete application for human resource management, especially performance management, from financial and operational models to analysis and user reporting. Users of the State Grid can access, analyze and view human resources data of the Institute at any time and place. ^[2]