How Analytics Can Be Used to Improve Your Business
June 22, 2024 
Today’s tech allows businesses to more easily chart important data and profit from analytics
Analytics mean different things to different people and organizations. As Advanced Grower Solutions expands on, analytics can mean “spreadsheets and charts and data and math and equations and presentation and analysis kind of all rolled up in a random bag of stuff,” and yet more. While you don’t need to understand every potential avenue of analytics, having a good program for your business can be crucial for its stability, growth, and success. Here’s a handy look from AGS at its handy acrostic for ANALYTICS and what they can mean for your business.
Answers
A fundamental aspect of business analytics is finding answers to problems before they escalate, or even before they turn into problems. Analytics can help your team identify potential problems, as well as opportunities, and then act on them swiftly.
Now
Many businesses use metrics for past events that, due to the nature of time, are only available and collected after everything has settled, whether it be a promotion, initiative, webinar, conference, or anything else. However, analytics can help businesses measure trends to anticipate the performance of future events, allowing them to make changes to finetune their preferred outcome.
Analysis Automation
Data collection can be a pointless venture if you’re not able to analyze and provide insight into what it means for your business. Additionally, data sets often need to be “merged, aggregated, and summarized to get desired information.”
While there are many smart and experienced workers in the market who can do this type of data organization, their talents are best served on other, more challenging, and important tasks. Therefore, it’s important for any good analytics program to have some measure of automation to simplify and speed up the process.
Leverage
Regarding another issue of resource and time allocation, AGS asks, “Do you really pay employees to run reports and cut and paste numbers into spreadsheets over and over and over again?”
Automation through analytics allows companies to leverage the capabilities of the software and save employee time that can be used to solve problems revealed by analytics analysis instead of wasted through manually collecting and compiling it.
You
“In working with hundreds of growers over the years our team knows that all growers’ operations are unique despite the fact that we all grow plants,” says Advanced Grower Solutions.
Therefore, an organization’s analytics program should help to highlight and leverage its uniqueness. It’s important to tailor the analytic process that can reveal these types of insights which, in turn, can give your business a competitive edge in the market.
Traction
AGS uses the analogy of a tractor spinning its wheels, getting no traction, when stuck in “analysis paralysis,” a term describing the effect of businesses drowning in data, but unsure what insights to gain from it.
Analytics automation can provide growers with this desperately needed traction by honing in on key metrics and values that are important to the company, either ones that signify success, or ones in need of improvement. This can give the team a much-needed target and goal to work for, helping to kickstart the problem-solving process.
Insight
As touched upon, analytics are “a component that helps growers gain insight into their business.”
More specifically, insight signifies the moment when your knowledge and experience in your industry and position combine with the analytics-organized data to create an understanding of a previously unknown issue plaguing your business. More generally, it’s an “Aha!” moment, leading you and your team toward potential changes to implement and opportunities to capitalize on.
Connection
An analytics program for your business is just one piece of the puzzle. As we touched upon, collected data isn’t helpful if you’re unable to capitalize upon it. That’s why you need to connect your insights from analytics to other parts of the company, prompting needed action.
Speed
Any analytics program worth its weight can help speed up your business in any number of ways
“Whether it’s a current availability or a ready projection or key metrics about your larger customers or item information that improves your planning process, there are analytics that help a grower operation move faster, answer queries faster, and serve customers faster.”
For additional information and an expanded look at how analytics can benefit your business, make sure to read the original article on the Advanced Grower Solutions website.
Subscribe to eNewsletter
