Ultimately, working on data allows:
In fact, today almost everything is data, or has the potential to become so.
The term is used to describe all the data that concern our activity, which generally exist in digital format.
It can be sales figures, quantities and types of interventions, quantities of objects produced, quantities of resources consumed, number of kilometers traveled, customer reviews...
This data can be found in Excel spreadsheets, databases, accounting software, customer relationship management (CRM), websites... It can also be multimedia content: image, video, audio.
We can thus develop devices to digitize physical elements: convert them or represent them in computer files.
As long as we haven't worked on them, they remain just data. The challenge is to make them talk to transform them into information, or raw material to feed systems that will produce value by optimizing the achievement of objectives: time savings, profit, well-being...
The objective here is to identify how data can improve your business.
A first step is to identify the data you have and determine the value that their exploitation can generate: the information they can offer, the questions they can help answer, the time savings that automating their processing can present.
As a complement, it is also worthwhile to identify the data you are missing to meet your challenges, which you should consider obtaining or creating.
Often the data is not usable as is and requires processing to be used.
Working on data quality informs about missing, invalid, duplicate data. Poor quality data can be costly, especially when it comes to contact data used in communications: postal addresses, emails, phone numbers. Actions of cleansing are then necessary: corrections, deduplication, standardization...
It is common for data about the same subject to exist in several silos: in databases, Excel files... It is interesting to aggregate, reconcile, connect, merge these scattered data to get a complete view of the subject in question.
Similarly, it may be interesting to enrich these data with additional data: geolocation data that allow for more visual representations, creation of specific indicators based on existing data that offer more synthetic views.
The point here is to make the data talk, and especially to make them readable by those they concern.
Data analysis allows to answer questions that we ask ourselves, to factualize intuitions, to identify correlations between measurements or events, to find explanations for phenomena. This allows one to make informed decisions, to prioritize one's actions based on factual criteria.
The visualization of data using charts and graphs is often crucial for easy and quick understanding of large amounts of complex data. Making dashboards helps greatly for simple and regular monitoring of an activity.
Beyond analyses and visualizations that extract information, data can also be used to automate tasks or solve problems.
Thus, we can create predictive models, which use data from the past to give predictions when presented with new data. For example, this is the type of model that is used by email companies to categorize emails as spam or non-spam.
The use of specific algorithms can also provide solutions that address optimization issues.
Working with data can bring benefits for all types of activities. In particular, having dashboards that allow to track indicators significant of one's activity at any time is a minimum for anyone who wants to be in control of their performance.
In the same way, everyone should benefit from relying on their data to make their decisions, including determining their priorities in terms of actions or investments, whether it's in help desk employee training needs, advertising budget allocation...
For sales/marketing/communication activities, data can be used to know its customers, their location, their buying habits, the products they frequently buy together, the circumstances and actions that trigger their purchases... to personalize the customer relationship and communicate the right offer at the right time.
In industrial activities, benefits are to be found in failure prediction that allows to anticipate maintenance operations, as well as in quality improvement by identifying defects as early as possible.
Solutions for optimization will be of interest to people in charge of carrying out plannings, whether they are team leaders, event organizers... It is also possible to optimize delivery routes or to pack items of given sizes into containers, which will be useful to transporters and logistics managers among others.