Ways Real-Time Analytics Can Help Businesses to Grow Faster – With Examples

Real-time analytics is capable of scaling up the business to great heights 

In an increasingly competitive world, no business owner can afford not to actively work to grow. If they do not do so one of their competitors will quickly take market share from them. Most entrepreneurs are only too aware of this. Yet, the vast majority of them are still not using their data to its fullest. Circa 70% are not data-driven – according to the  New Vantage Partners' 2019 Big Data and AI Executive Survey.

If you are one of those businesses, read on, to gain a better understanding of how using live data correctly will transform your company.

Live testing in-store advertising effectiveness

Many retailers still do not realize that it is possible to gain sales insights into digital signage performance, and provided you have bought the right system it is incredibly easy to do. The best digital display ad packages automatically record what time the advert was changed. This means that you can easily take a report that summarises those changes and compare them to sales data for each time period. A retailer can easily see whether there was an uplift in sales for a specific product or group of products around the time it was being advertised.

It is also possible to carry out A/B testing to work out which format of advert works best. In stores, where loyalty cards are used that include details of age, gender, and postcode even more detailed analysis can be carried out.

The technique becomes even more powerful if you have someone monitoring the impact of your digital ads in real-time. That way if the first advert drove sales, but the second one did not, the first advert can once again be shown on the in-store display screens.

Using live sales data and advertising monitoring to identify hot trends

This makes it easy to see which trends are taking off. Enabling any business owner to stock up and tap into as many golden sales opportunities as possible. This is yet another example of how a relatively simple line of data can be transformed into a treasure trove of information when it is married with other pieces of information.

To control stock-flow and properly assign staff resources

In the past, it was impossible to compare demand and supply accurately, let alone in real-time. Now it is possible. A store owner can immediately see when an item is going out of stock. Better still they can use If This Then That scripting and programming for that situation to trigger certain actions. To get shelf stackers to include that item in their next shop floor pick. As well as adding a case of it to their next order.

Doing this in live time, e.g., the system updating every 15 minutes ensures the store never loses sales due to out of stocks. Manufacturers do something similar, so that production can be continuous. It also makes it possible to run a business using the Just In Time principle, which is good for cash flow. As well as profitability because far less storage space is needed.

In the case of service organizations, real-time analytics helps them see what their resource pool is doing at any point in time and where they can pull resources. It can also help to determine whether they are meeting client demand and lock in growth opportunities. Furthermore, real-time analytics can also be beneficial in identifying weak areas and predicting future demands.

Using live data to keep an operation running smoothly

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology has opened up a whole new range of opportunities for businesses to use live analysis to keep things running smoothly. Having sensors set up on a production line that automatically sends data through to a central point. Even a simple per unit counter can alert a business owner to a long list of potential issues. For example, when the sensor over the top of the rejects bin starts to ping, the line manager can be alerted via a digital message. Enabling them to immediately track down what is going wrong.

Now is the time to take action

So, if you are not yet tapping into the power of real-time analytics, now is the time to change that. Real-world businesses really do need real-time data. If you don´t do it you can be sure that your competitors will and that you will lose sales to them.

To learn more about how to set up proper data analysis in any business, start with this simple guide. It provides you with an overview of what you can do with analytics, which along with the above examples will help you to decide where to focus your efforts first.