View

Poi

nt

Business AnalyticsTomorrow’s analytics that will change the way we make decisions

www.infosys.com

- Arindam Banerji, Parashar Borkotoky

Introduction

Enterprises have been extremely patient with their business intelligence (BI) investments over the years. But, two things have changed, Volatility of markets and the need to manage a myriad of data sources along with huge amounts of data means that decision-making has to move beyond gut feel. Second - with a large number of BI initiatives failing to meet stated objectives within reasonable RoI cycles, decision making capabilities must be made available to a large set of users in quick time with investments that are user-centric and not necessarily just focused on scale. Third, organizations today are not satisfied with traditional reporting models that rely on historical data and answer ‘what happened?’ They are increasingly wanting to know:

• What will happen next? • What’s the best that can happen? • What if these trends continue?

Finally, the science has changed – Hadoop, Pregel are not the same in their science as traditional OLAP tools – the business decisions they support have also changed. This sea-shift from traditional BI, which we waguely term as Business Analytics, is going to shape how decisions are made and attract significant IT investments.

2 | Infosys – View Point

What are the key trends that are shaping Business Analytics?

What are the key gaps in today’s business intelligence systems?Today’s business intelligence systems are adept at gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to historical data. However, they often fall short in looking at the future – they’re quite poor in ensuring that decision makers can deal with volatility in their operating businesses and markets. Key gaps include:

• Unable to predict key business metrics with reasonable amount of accuracy – volatility in markets, external factors not available in historical data

• Lack of industry specific reasoning and decision making models – especially incorporation of functional and sub-vertical specific decision scenarios/algorithms

• Lack of deep, yet contextualized visualization that can make use of BI, pervasive across the enterprise regardless of the device it is served upon

• Lack of a unified data foundation where there is absolute trust in the quality of data – especially the ability to seamlessly integrate the right data from both structured and unstructured sources

• Unable to find statistical relationships between data that can provide strategic insights – co-relation between datasets that can lead to insights

• Inability to map disruptive technologies such as big data or in-memory computing into the right kind of decision making tools

Predict the future

Executives want to predict the future and not just the past. They want our approaches to do through tools/consulting, what they used to do through gut feel

Expand the number of users – 8-10% of users use BI today

Big Data, In-Memory, Analytics as a service, Unstructured data

BI Transformation like ERP Transformation – Concept of Information ERP

Enable bottom-line cost savings

Expected GDP Growth

Regulatory Environment

Consumer Spend Trend

Appropriate visualization for end use models

Device enablement

OPEX Centric business case

Faster, Cheaper Functionality

Business Analytics initiatives at corporate levels

Accuracy of Data

Redundancy of Data

Improve revenue predictability

Improve Productivity of users

Reduce Cost of Initiatives

Improve speed and accuracy of decision -making at highest levels

Decrease costs

Business Driver

Why is this important?

Examples of metrics/changes

Financial Impact

Consumerization

Disruptive Technologies

Transformational

Changes

Data Foundation

Infosys – View Point | 3

The Infosys Business Analytics offering

Infosys’ is creating a business analytics offering that will give you the processes, tools and expertise to extract the most out of your information investments.

The offerings combine deep domain understanding of business scenarios with advanced technology and analytical techniques to enable quick time to market at affordable price.

The offering will consist of these components:

• Turnkey Offerings that can be used to manage business metrics and tied to business outcomes e.g Forecasting accuracy

• Domain content for key business scenarios like Vendor performance management

• A seamless platform infrastructure with pre-built stack for decision making, analysis and data management.

• Surround services like Knowledge services that are required to manage the business outcome

A Business analytics scenarioLet’s consider the following scenario around Vendor performance management which is typical for manufacturing companies.

BUSINESS DRIVER

• Increased outsourcing and reliance on suppliers

• Globalization of business and of supply chains

• Continuous Merger and Acquisitions

• Ever-changing Industry and government regulations

• Increased uncertainty and unstable supply market

• Improve Profitability

CHALLENGES

• Increased complexity in managing suppliers

• Fragmented supplier data across multiple disconnected purchasing systems

• Increased risk of supply disruptions

• Monitor and reduce sourcing costs

4 | Infosys – View Point

Infosys approachThe Infosys business analytics approach to such a problem will entail looking at both historical data analysis as well as predictive data analysis such as early warning systems.

An effective business analytics approach for Vendor management would involve looking at the information from multiple perspectives:

Infosys approach (Illustrative)

Historical Insights

E.g. analysis of quality and effectiveness of suppliers

What-if analysis

E.g. Ability to model the key levers that impact vendor costs

Prediction

Ability to estimate the number of defects based on both internal and external factors

Infosys – View Point | 5

Illustrative Business OutcomesUsing a well-rounded business analytics

approach can result in quantifiable benefits such as:

reduction in procurement costs5%

lead time reduction3%

improvement in ontime delivery20%

6 | Infosys – View Point

ConclusionThe promise of decision making applications, deployed in cost effective systems that derive insights from all information repositories, internal and external, structured and unstructured along with focus on not just ‘what has happened?’ but also on ‘what will happen?’ will make business insights truly beneficial to all business users– the holy grail of Business Analytics.

Infosys – View Point | 7

About the Authors

Arindam Banerji

Unit Technology Officer, Manufacturing, Infosys Limited

For the last 18 years, Arindam has been a technologist of some visibility within the industry. As one of the visionaries and chief technologist behind E-speak at HP, Arindam in the late-nineties laid the foundation for the next generation of computing, now broadly known as web services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). He was also one of the early pioneers of semantic search.

In the past, he has been the Global R&D head for Hewlett Packard’s Web-Services (then called E–Services) product lines, Principal Scientist and Head of Strategy Research Organization for HP’s Services business, Architect at Sun Microsystems and the CTO for several tech. startups in the Manufacturing space.

At Infosys, his group focuses on providing technology strategy and advisory services to Manufacturing customers globally, while providing intellectual property driven solutions in the supply chain and engineering collaboration spaces.

He has a PhD from the University of Notre Dame, over 30 publications and 6 patents.

Arindam can be reached at Arindam_Banerji@infosys.com

Parashar Borkotoky

Principal Architect - Manufacturing

Parashar has over 13 years of experience in the IT industry, and is a certified TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) practitioner. He has active interest in supply chain problems/ solutions, information management and data quality. Parashar anchors the Manufacturing Information Effectiveness suite of solutions within Infosys that focuses on solving business analytics and data foundation problems in various manufacturing industry sectors like Automotive, Discrete manufacturing etc. He also works closely with manufacturing enterprises to strategize technology focused business initiatives.

Parashar can be reached at Parashar_Borkotoky@infosys.com

© 2012 Infosys Limited, Bangalore, India. Infosys believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice. Infosys acknowledges the proprietary rights of the trademarks and product names of other companies mentioned in this document.

About Infosys

Many of the world's most successful organizations rely on Infosys to deliver measurable business value. Infosys provides business consulting, technology, engineering and outsourcing services to help clients in over 30 countries build tomorrow's enterprise.

For more information, contact askus@infosys.com www.infosys.com