By Sandra Galiano - Business Analytics is fast becoming a fundamental tool for any entrepreneur wishing to be successful. This is because nowadays, we generate data practically every moment in every single second of every day without even noticing. 

“There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003 (...), but that much information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing.” - Eric Schmidt, CEO at Google. 

Taking into account the relevance of social media and our significant ‘daily life usage’ contribution to these technologies, we have - as a direct result - a hyperconnected world in which information appears to be power, now more than ever. 

“Data analytics is the future, and the future is NOW! Every mouse click, keyboard button press, swipe or tap is used to shape business decisions. Everything is about data these days. Data is information, and information is power.”- Radi, Data Analyst at CENTOGENE.

In this world - thanks to current technologies - we can have a totally different lifestyle from the one our parents or even older siblings experienced. 

Our communication, buying, selling, investing, planning trips, and even entrepreneurship undertaking - among many other facets of human activity - had changed due to the profound implications of the current data technologies. 

So, it is only logical to imagine that, for specific jobs, the result will be to outgrow, transform, or even die. One of the areas impacted in this fashion is the one we aim to focus on in this article: Business Analyst. 

What is Business Analytics?

Business Analytics is the discipline focused on analyzing data with the objective of providing the company with favorable results and increasing the decision-making process. 

Thus, a Business Analyst is a person whose firm grasp of both worlds - technology and business - allows the contribution and proper team working between the CEO and the programmer since he can deeply understand the two parts involved. 

The three main types of analytics to master 

What should we do? What's the next step? How can I solve this problem? These and many more questions can be answered with business analytics, having data as the centerpiece of the whole project.  

The decision-making process is based on three main types of analytics encompassed in the business analytics area, those are: 

• Descriptive Analytics: uses the data to see what is happening or has happened in the company to create a bigger picture of the business and its situation. For instance, the sales certain businesses had of a specific product over the last two years, ordered by months. We could see the relationships with things such as the festivities, and temperatures, compared with the sales of its substitute or complementary product, among others. 

In this analytics, we use techniques such as sentiment analysis, statistics, averages, graphic visualization, dashboards, etc. 

• Predictive Analytics: answers the question of what could happen. Its foundation is the analysis of the future based on the relationship between business variables. We could use for this analysis data mining techniques like linear regression, classification, clusterization, statistical analysis, or machine learning.  

• Prescriptive Analytics: what should we do? Using the previously analyzed analytics, we conclude with a decision for the business, considering the rules, characteristics, vision, and objectives of the company involved. In this phase, we use optimization, simulation, or multi-criteria decision analysis tools. 

“Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway.” - Geoffrey Moore, management consultant and author of Crossing the Chasm

Every Business Analytics project follows certain well-structured steps that include the tools to use and how to proceed. This is what data scientists or analysts use professionally in a company. However, all of this is scalable, it can be shaped for a small business or an entrepreneur from the most elemental, and still, without having the greatest techniques or tools, results can be improved considerably. 

7 steps to succeed in a Business Analytics Project

1. Data Sources: the basis of any project, data. By working with it, we will achieve our project objectives.

“Data are just summaries of thousands of stories—tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful.” - Dan Heath, bestselling author.

The data is there, everywhere. However, not all have the same quality. It is important, when using business techniques based on data analysis, to find reliable sources of information and, above all, useful ones.

There are many tools for this; I recommend doing two procedures when working with sources: go to secure pages of high-quality information and differentiate between data, information, knowledge, and insight.

“We are surrounded by data, but starved for insights.”- Jay Baer, marketing and customer experience expert.

It is very important to follow the steps of data, information, knowledge, and insight to discern what we have, where we come from, and where we are heading.

• Data: representation of an attribute or variable, that is, the data as we find it. Example: 2,700
• Information: organized data set. Example: 2700 blue sneakers sold this last month.
• Knowledge: conclusion. Example: Blue sneakers have sold very well this month.
• Insight: intelligent part, the objective.  Example: improving the production of blue sneakers for the following month.

By interpreting the data and giving it meaning, we find the information, and when we draw conclusions from this, we have the knowledge, being able to obtain valuable insight.

What kind of data do we have? We could mainly divide them into 3

categories according to their format:

1. Structured Data: Have a fixed format and field. For example, everything you can put in a table, such as numbers.
2. Semi-structured Data: This is data that does not have a fixed format but does have some internal organization system that facilitates its treatment, such as labels, markers, etc. (XML, HTML, CSV).
3. Unstructured Data: They do not have any type of structure, for example, images, audio, or text, generally abundant in social networks.

And what about sources? We can divide them into sources internal to the company and external. 

Regarding the internal ones, we find CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning). The first is associated with the management of the relationship with customers and commercial contracts, and the second one is with the company's own finances, sales, purchases, etc. In general, any data that the company itself gives us comes from an internal source.

In external sources to the company, we will therefore have all the data that we obtain from abroad but that we need or that is convenient for the company. Examples: social networks, open data from governments, and official sources such as the National Statistics Institute, among others. 

2. Data Ingestion: The process by which data is extracted from different sources to dump them into the data repository for further analysis. The main part of this is another process called ETL, which stands for Extraction, Transformation, and Load, although it's actually five major steps:

1.  Data extraction

2.  Cleaning: Duplications, correct errors, complete empty values…

3. Transformation: recovers the clean data and summarizes it in the analysis models.

4. Integration: Validation that the data that we are going to load is consistent with the necessary definitions and formats.

5. Update: A process that allows us to add new data to the repository.

3. Storage:  where are we going to store this data? It is generally a database, a set of related information whose treatment is facilitated using a database management system.

4. Processing: what do we do with the data? specific techniques used to answer the questions. How do we process this data? What do we want to do with them? This is the most technical part of the project and in which programming skills, data mining, etc., are involved.

5. Visualization: we will understand what we are doing and the results obtained, but we have to consider that this has to be understood by someone completely unrelated to us, who, in most cases, will not have the technical knowledge or skills that we have. That is why this phase focuses on synthesizing the information, putting it in graphs and dashboards, and showing the data and processes in the clearest way possible.

6. Consumption: It is time to present these dashboards and those results to others, perhaps to the CEO or those responsible for making the last decisions of the company. This is where the analyst has to demonstrate communication and problem-solving oratory skills and where he has to narrate that story with data from the moment the problem or objective was raised until he found the final proposal, justifying the entire process.

7. Action: decision making. Based on all the previous steps, what will the company do? This will be a very rich decision since it will have hard work behind it that confirms that it will be the best possible. 

To make the long story short, data analysis can transform your business, not only making it more profitable, solving problems, or anticipating what the future holds, but also fulfilling the obligation to adapt to the constantly changing society that reigns in these times and avoiding being left behind, or stagnate; and as it is printed on the vinyl of my university class, “to transform a world of data into a world of intelligence”.

About the author: Sandra is a tech-savvy young entrepreneur currently President of Generación Empresarial, a youth-oriented university association committed to creating the next generation of successful European business leaders.

🔥 Check out more about Sandra here!🔥

The post What is Business Analytics? 7 steps to make the right call! appeared first on Cross-Border Magazine.

By our partners at LogiCommerce. Consumers are increasingly buying products online across borders, which undoubtedly offers the opportunity for thousands of businesses to expand internationally in a much simpler and less costly way, thanks to eCommerce. 

According to data provided by Statista, in 2021 more than 8 out of 10 online shoppers in Austria made cross-border purchases. Belgium and Switzerland came in second with 72% and 65% of eCommerce users shopping on international sites. 

61% of users in Spain, Portugal, and Finland, shop internationally and are followed by the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Germany with 54%, 50%, 47%, and 37% respectively. 

Adapting the eCommerce content and main settings such as language, currency, payment methods, logistics management, shipping costs, and many more things in your international sales strategy are crucial to reaching new markets successfully. 

In eCommerce, the greatest barriers are usually the logistics service and shipping costs, i.e., the time it takes to deliver a product from the time the consumer places the order until it is received, and the costs involved therein. For this reason, you should have an eCommerce platform that meets all these requirements.

LogiCommerce is the eCommerce software ready to grow your business to new markets rapidly, efficiently, and effectively thanks to more than 200 high-end native features that create the best shopping experience.

• Configure multiple domains by language or by country to create more engagement and higher SEO ranking 
• Target your audience and adapt your content to several languages 
• Set prices, discounts, and shipping in different currencies to reach a wider target market 
• Apply different tax policies depending on the product and country source and destination
• Generate multiple shipments of an order based on different logistic criteria
• Set up and segment payment systems for each currency and country
• Create multiple invoicing companies and bill your customers based on their location

Create and edit your content with ease to manage an overall digital experience across all your sales channels, thanks to its advanced WYSIWYG editor. Moreover, you can filter the visualization of pages, banners, category areas, blog posts, news, and many more by country, area, user, and user group. 

Manage each country easily

Managing your eCommerce by country has never been that easy. Automatically display currency, language, and formats or simply redirect consumers based on location. Customize your eCommerce according to each location by identifying the user’s source via GeoIP and blocking it for countries not included in the sales areas by showing a blank page and redirecting users to another domain.

It also offers a multi-carrier shipping and fulfillment solution integrated with your preferred national and international shipping carriers with which your platform can automatically calculate shipping costs based on the consumer location and other advanced parameters. Configure shipping costs by weight or order amount and specify the shipping destination countries allowed by shipping method.

Assign your warehouses to different logistics centers to effectively manage your deliveries and define the geographical areas of influence of each warehouse to cover all your shipments. In case the linked warehouse with the highest priority doesn’t have stock, supply it for another one.

Control card and bank information

Securely send credit card information directly from the client’s browser to the multiple local and international payment gateways. Calculate taxes automatically from your base price and break down all taxes, shipping costs, and all associated costs with the payment method in the shopping cart and sales document. 

Simplify the entire process of creating, maintaining, and managing your products and specifications for your Headless Front-ends with multiple options such as shopping by brand, showing related products, providing advanced product personalization, sending out of stock notifications, scheduling content, offering product duplication, assigning products to multiple categories, and many more. 

Grow your business while simplifying the process of internationalization with a highly customizable platform that helps you boost sales and increase traffic by supporting all your business needs. LogiCommerce is the solution to deliver outstanding shopping experiences anywhere and grow with confidence providing maximum speed to guarantee the best for both your online store and your customers. 

To sum up, we highly recommend you review all these functionalities prior to choosing an eCommerce platform. Is your eCommerce prepared for multiple currencies? Can you customize content and prices per country? Can the platform handle increasing traffic during peak seasons? All these factors and more can influence whether or not your international sales strategy will be successful.

The post Successfully launch your international online sales strategy! appeared first on Cross-Border Magazine.