Introduction to analytics
Big data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) focus on predictive capabilities to solve business problems. These advanced analytics methods enable organizations to make data-driven decisions and uncover new opportunities.
Analytics can transform raw data into an extensive collection of information that categorizes data to identify and analyze behavioral data and patterns. Organizations can use this information to analyze the current state of their operations and to predict future behavior and trends by asking "what-if" questions. Additionally, analytics can help with fraud detection, image recognition, sentiment analysis, overall general employee productivity, and it also often replaces cumbersome manual processes.
Consider a scenario where you ask an employee to determine the cause of a recent spike in sales. The employee might have to painstakingly inspect each sale, interview customers, talk to sales people, and examine market trends. Instead, you can use the Key Influencers visual, which uses advanced analytics, to get a faster explanation. The visual is only as good as the data that you give it, meaning you still have to collect the data and organize it. The actual analytics, however, can be done for you or at least give you an excellent start.
By reducing manual work, advanced analytics is ultimately able to help organizations make better business decisions and create actionable and meaningful results.
Traditionally, data analysis was a complex task that performed by data engineers. Today, data analysis is more accessible to, and understood by, many people within organizations and across all teams. Power BI is an exceptional tool for quickly pulling actionable insights from data. It allows you to build visuals and metrics for your data in reports and dashboards so that you and your users can analyze data insights. They can start by analyzing at a high level and drill down into those insights for more detailed information, when necessary.
In this module's scenario, you work for Tailwind Traders as a data analyst. Your task is to create reports and dashboards that support key business decisions by showing high-level insights and visuals using advanced analytics. Each team requires unique reports and dashboards:
- The Product team wants to know if specific products aren't selling as well as others.
- The Sales team is focused on sales forecasts for the coming year.
- The Warehouse team is interested in a general breakdown of how the warehousing and shipping locations are performing worldwide.
This module outlines the built-in functionality to help you accomplish your tasks with Power BI. By the end of this module, you'll use advanced analytics to identify trends, track data changes, and create predictive models. These features can help your organization make better business decisions, plans, and forecasts.