Driving Competitive Advantage With Embedded Predictive Analytics
Competitive advantage is derived by an organization when it develops strategies, techniques, or resources that allow it to outperform its competition. One such resource is the innovative use of analytics to improve business decisions or operational processes. Decision makers can use analytics to cultivate the data collected from day-to-day operations into key insights unavailable to the competition.
Predictive analytics moves beyond the practice of creating reports on past events, and towards the use of sophisticated statistical methods to predict future outcomes. An organization equipped with the capability of scientifically predicting future outcomes, while its rivals are merely looking at reports of past events and doing damage control, will have significant informational and decision-making advantage over its competition.
This paper will introduce predictive analysis, contrast it with more traditional forms of business intelligence, and then examine how embedding predictive analytics in existing business systems provides operational efficiencies, cost reduction, and above all, exceptional competitive advantage.