Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence Solutions
Revonotion analysts will help you improve the efficiency and quality of your business procedures with intelligent solutions using approaches of analysis/data mining, forecasting, optimization and decision support. Depending on your organization and requirements, several of these tools will be combined to provide a full solution entirely tailored to your needs.
Analysis and Data Mining
Most organizations collect and maintain large amounts of data. At the same time a vast ocean of data is available through the Internet. All this data is useless in its raw form but, with proper preparation, analysis and mining, extremely useful information can be extracted. This information can range from simple statistical metrics to very complex models.
Profiling derives useful models and profiles matching specific contexts or criteria. Profiling is used in marketing to create descriptions of certain groups of clients, in customer service to derive models of behavior and preferences, in forensics etc.
Trends in any kind of metric or behavior are derived from timed data. Such trends reveal how seasonal effects or important events influence variables such as sales, customer behavior, traffic, energy consumption etc.
Classification of cases to a number of possible alternative classes based on past data can be a very accurate procedure with the added benefits of automation and speed. Classification is valuable in banking for credit scoring, insurance companies for deciding risk levels, marketing for targeting mail and phone campaigns etc.
Associations can be discovered in causality relations or corelations between variables. Association rules are valuable in applications such as market basket analysis in retailing, website usage analysis and service packet designing.
Pattern recognition is applied to automatically process visual images, sound or to find patterns in large datasets. Image analysis is used in surveillance and security (e.g. face recognition/tracking or intruder detection), for character recognition (e.g. handwriting or license plates), for examining scans (e.g. locating elements, detecting flaws or in medical applications) etc. Sound analysis is applied to speech recognition in human-computer interaction for user friendly interfaces and assistive systems. Pattern recognition in large datasets is very useful in cases such as detecting credit card fraud in transaction logs, performing traffic analysis for communications security.
Text mining is used to derive information from text documents written in natural language. Text mining applications include search engines, security and filters, converting aggregations of documents into structured databases, automatic marketing analyses based on review sites and forums, sentiment analysis of letters and managing news streams.
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Forecasting
Predicting the future is one of the most important needs for business in order to make good decisions. Forecasting uses historical data to provide such predictions.
Product demand and sales prediction is essential in manufacturing, service providing and retailing in order to make informed decisions regarding product volumes and resources allocation.
Stock needs can be efficiently forecasted resulting in reduced inventory costs while maintaining functional operations with the necessary materials, spare parts etc.
Workload prediction in service providing aids in efficiently staffing services with minimum cost while maintaining standards of service quality.
Customer attrition prediction can assist businesses to reduce churn rate by focusing their customer retention activities to the customers most likely to defect.
Econometrics approaches are used to forecast economic trends (income, unemployment, inflation etc.) in a regional, national or international level.
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Optimization
Optimization aims at finding good solutions among an intractable number of alternatives. Problems are usually multi-objective (cost, time, quality, performance etc.) and subject to hard constraints as well as soft preferences.
Scheduling aims at the efficient allocation of limited resources (machines, material, staff, space, transportation etc.) to several tasks along a timeline. Instances of the scheduling problem are endless, e.g. scheduling production in manufacturing, project planning, fleet (cars, shipping, airlines) management, staff rosters, classroom timetables, air-time management for marketing campaigns. Efficient scheduling is essential for minimizing the costs and making optimal use of the available resources of every organization.
Design optimization is of great value to industrial, engineering or product designs in terms of cost, performance and reliability. Design optimization can automate and greatly speed up the design process and yield superior results - even outside human engineering abilities. Design optimization can be applied to structural designs for buildings and constructions, automobile and aircraft design, alloy design in metallurgy, machinery optimization etc.
Route planning problems include finding the shortest (in terms of distance, time, cost etc.) path between two locations or constructing an efficient route that includes certain locations. Efficient route planning is important for logistics, product delivery services, navigation devices and transportation networks design.
Selection optimization aims at finding an optimal selection of items among several choices that maximize benefit while respecting certain constraints such as limited resources and budget. Real-life examples include portfolio selection and asset selection for securities in finance, cargo loading in freights and efficient material cutting in manufacturing.
Floor planning is concerned with designing a layout of components within a defined space while optimizing some utility of these components. Optimizing floor planning is essential for organizing manufacturing plants or other commercial/professional spaces but also for designing integrated circuits and visualizing complex structures.
Any numeric and combinatorial optimization: The above cases are only a few of the possible applications of intelligent optimization. Generally, any plan/structure/design/etc. can be subject to optimization, usually with impressive results in quality improvement.
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Decision Support
Business intelligence tools provide decision makers with automated real-time support to facilitate fast and knowledgable decisions.
Intelligent reports, data marts and dashboards combine results of any of the above methods operating on data bases and live data streams to produce meaningful presentations of analyses, summaries, forecasts, etc. that are an invaluable asset in decision making.
Data warehouses are necessary for organizations with large volumes of data from multiple sources and formats in order to make efficient use of their data and extract useful information from them. Accumulated data are then analyzed to produce useful information and intelligent reports.
Expert systems automate reasoning procedures by using knowledge elicited from human experts. Expert systems can reduce costs or alleviate procedural bottlenecks by speeding up knowledge intensive processes.