How Analytics can help Organizations in Turbulent time of Covid-19

COVID-19 has affected over 17 million people worldwide, claiming over half a million lives till July 2020 when we created this blog. Companies like IBM brought in some much-needed computing power to forecast the virus’s trajectory across countries which greatly contributed to controlling the outbreak in addition to supporting the effort involved in creating a vaccine.

But there is another area where technology can help soften the impact of COVID-19 – the business world.

The world economy has shrunk and a threat of financial recession looms. Such a turbulent situation is forcing companies to scale back business activities, look for ways to optimize their operations, and save cash. Layoffs and furloughs are a very heartbreaking option for them to adopt and many people-focused companies only look at them as a last resort.

Hence, to stay afloat, businesses need to rely on technology to help tide over this crisis and one key area they could turn to for direction is analytics.

Big data analytics has proven to be remarkably successful in helping nations and health organizations worldwide to identify more insights about the Coronavirus. Now they are in a position to help businesses identify avenues to reshape their operational models in the wake of such a worldwide calamity.

When we look at the areas where big data analytics can help businesses to tide over the crisis, there are 3 key areas where the most impact can be made. They are,

• Better Demand Forecasting
• Improving Operational Efficiency
• Planning Budgets

Let’s examine them in detail:

Better Demand Forecasting

The spike in COVID 19 cases often occur in very irregular patterns. It only takes a matter of days for an area clear of any infection to report an alarming rate of growth in patients. Hence businesses operating in these regions must make decisions at breakneck speed.

Additionally, the stress on supplies and logistic chains due to the outbreak means there is widespread uncertainty on the timelines for delivery of services or products. For example, if you are a retailer, then stocks of specific items may run out quickly due to panic buying induced by the pandemic. Add to that, the timelines for the replenishment inventory to reach stores will be uncertain.

With analytics, businesses can feed customer data from their daily operations to quickly identify shopping trends and sudden surges in demand for certain commodities or services. By identifying patterns of buying, more advanced forecasting of demand can be made, and corresponding advanced decisions can be made with regards to inventory and logistical support. A good example will be increasing the supply of essential cereals and pulses which people show more interest in buying as compared to discretionary items in the current situation.

Improving Operational Efficiency

COVID 19 is a health emergency for which the only present solution is staying out of close contact with people, practicing high personal hygiene, and wearing masks. While the majority of desk-based jobs across companies have moved to work from home mode to help employees stay indoors and protected from the infection, there are millions of jobs that do not have this luxury as they need physical on the job presence. At the same time, due to falling demand, businesses too do not need all of their resources to be deployed across customer bases.

Analytics allows companies to determine the demand for services and goods. By mining those insights, workforce allocation can be optimized to ensure that only the most optimum level of resources are deployed with caution to serve the demand. It becomes easier to plan schedules for employees and introduce measures such as rosters and rotational shifts to manage performance as well as costs.

Another example of how analytics can improve operational efficiency is by analyzing the work patterns of employees when they operate remotely from their homes. This is new to everyone and employees are reporting being overburdened. This impacts their well-being as well as performance. By analyzing trends about working hours, work-load distribution, turnaround times, and other similar parameters, it becomes easier for companies to prioritize tasks. This helps them achieve better results faster without compromising the work-life balance of the employees working from home.

Planning & Budgeting

COVID 19 has brought about an economic and cultural shift in the way we lead our lives. For businesses, the coming years will be a test of their ability to optimize their costs and generate sustainable revenue in dynamic and challenging conditions. For this to happen, they need to prepare a well laid out budget for every Dollar they need to spend. Analytics can help in this regard to a great extent.

From the other 2 areas we described earlier, analytics helps you derive insights into how business growth will be focused on limited areas and how your workforce requirements will change from their past behavior. These insights can serve as the foundation for yet another level of analytics which will help in driving budgets for all kinds of business activities ranging from marketing, customer acquisition costs, recruitments, investments on innovation ( deciding on the best solutions to improve profits), new market entry expenditure and much more. Analytics will help ensure that the relevant conditions are factored into the budgets and that hidden trends and connections are made apparent. This will ensure that a more complete and relevant budget comes about.

The COVID 19 pandemic has brought about unprecedented levels of uncertainty in businesses worldwide. While past models of success may struggle to deliver value in the new normal, business strategies supported by intelligent analytics of data generated from several organizational touchpoints can show a way forward. For businesses, this could be a call for increasing their investments on analytics to reshape their thoughts on what works well and what doesn’t to shift course to ensure survival and sustainable growth.

Are you looking for similar used cases to be implemented within your Organizations? Please feel free to contact us.

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