Predicting the future has always been elusive and tantalizing to humankind. We all want to know what is going to happen next because that knowledge can weigh down all our disbelief, doubts, and worries. But the gloomy truth is that none of us can get a clear picture of the future, so we are all compelled to take giant leaps based on our intuitions, instincts, and wits.
However, math and technology took a giant leap in this ‘extracting the future’ fiasco and presented the world with the concept of Predictive Analytics Software.
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What is Predictive Analytics Software?
Predictive analytics software is a tool that enlists the help of statistical algorithms, historical data, and machine learning to extract ongoing patterns. These ongoing patterns are then extrapolated and tested to provide a predictive future outcome.
This technique is practiced by all organizations worldwide to discover potential risks, threats, and opportunities that surround their business decisions. Predictive analytics software is deployed by data scientists, data analysts, and business users on the cloud or premise. The objective of deploying this tool is to go hold on to business development while simultaneously averting business crises.
Predictive analytics software not only gives you intel on the past data patterns but also provides you a sneak peek into the nearly plausible future of your company.
As a matter of fact, the introduction of predictive analytics software broadened the scope of predictive analytics. This is because before the software predictive analytics remained a fixed domain of the mathematicians and statisticians, but the blend of technology-enabled it to extend its horizon beyond mathematicians and statisticians. Today even business experts and business analysts make use of predictive analytics.
Importance of Predictive Analytics Software
Several business organizations have adopted predictive analytics software to sustain and uncover new business opportunities as well as avoid any business risks that fall within the realm of possibility. Other than that, there are multiple ways in which the predictive analytics software serves an organization well, and that includes:
Downsizing potential risks: Determining the creditworthiness of a person is the best practice to stay away from fraud buyers. Predictive analytics software can easily recognize a person’s credit score by matching data to previous data patterns. This prevents any involvement of fake or fraudulent buyers.
Pattern detection: Pattern detection is one of the primary uses of predictive analytics software. Detecting patterns can help an organization monitor criminal behavior, as cybersecurity has been a significant concern to businesses for ages. Therefore, applying pattern detection techniques can help an organization comb through the network and spot any kind of surfing oddities, surfing abnormalities, or anything that screams zero-day vulnerability, fraud, or threats.
Enhance business operations: Predictive analytics software can be used to assist business operations. Predictive analytics software can create business models that can forecast inventory and provide ideas regarding resource management. This helps the organization to improve its work environment and function more effectively. For example, an airline facility can use predictive business analytics to forecast occupancy rates and align ticket prices with them. A hotel can use predictive analytics software to determine the number of guests on a specific day and set room prices.
Draw attractive marketing campaigns: Organizations can make use of predictive analytics software to calculate sales performance, customer responses, number of purchases made. And use this information to promote themselves and set offers in order to attract, sustain, and increase their profitable customers.
Uses of Predictive Analytics Software
Organizations have long held onto predictive analytics software in order to manage business-related crises, optimize marketing campaigns and improve business operations and services. So here are a few more details about how different industries make use of this potent business tool to flourish and bloom their existence.
The financial industry: The financial industry has a knack for predictions as they hang insane amounts of money and data at stake on a daily basis. This is what makes the financial industry significantly open to tools like predictive analytics software. The use of this tool helps banking and other financial services to overcome terrible problems like fraud, credit risks, and data theft. Moreover, predictive analytics software helps financial services to retain customers and increase their up-sell opportunities. Predictive analytics software can assist a bank in detecting fraud transactions within 40 milliseconds of transaction initiation.
The retail industry: Retail industry has embraced this powerful tool of predictions for decades. Retailers put predictive analytics software into applications for determining merchandise pricing and optimization. On top of it, predictive analytics software helps retailers plan appropriate purchase offers, discounts, and marketing schemes for the targeted consumers. This planning is based on historic data patterns and contributes to increased ROIs (Return on Investment).
The Public Sector: The modern-day government does not lag on technology; rather, they took full advantage of it. The government public sector has been deploying predictive analytics software to:
- Improve efficiency
- Enhance services
- Detect frauds
- Comprehend consumer behavior
- Keep cybersecurity intact
- Analyze population trends etc.
The Energy Industry (Oil, gas, and other utilities): The energy industry is one of the most important as well as risk-prone industries. It makes use of elements and resources that can cause significant damage if not handled properly. This is why it becomes excessively imperative for this industry to recruit the assistance of a prediction tool like predictive analytics software. The predictive analytics software has so far helped the energy industry in various ways, some of which includes:
- Predicting the maintenance dates for turbines
- Forecasting equipment failures
- Listing reliability and safety threats
- Enhancing performance
- Predicting the future resource requirements of the industry etc.
The manufacturing industry: Whether it is about discovering problems with the product quality or forecasting failures in production, or understanding claims on warranty, the manufacturing industry has accepted the concept of predictive analytics software with the utmost vigor. The adoption of predictive analytics software has reduced overall cost, production risks, and service charges of the manufacturing industries by a decent level. The usage of this software has only been beneficial to this industry.
The health insurance industry: Health insurance industry deals with sensitive information and services. Therefore this industry needs to be highly vigilant regarding wrongful claims and also come up with a service that is quick in order to help the needy in time. This is the sole reason why the health insurance industry enlists the help of predictive analytics software to find great interventions for patients who are most likely to be hit with chronic diseases in the near future.
Other uses of Predictive Analytics Software
Predictive analytics software is a richly designed tool that assists an enterprise in various ways. Many areas of work use this tool to their benefit, and some examples include:
- Risk analytics
- Workforce Analytics
- Supply chain Analytics
- Customer Analytics
- Financial Analytics
- Sentiment and Semantic Analytics etc.
All in all, predictive analytics software is an excellent tool that can help a company avert high time risks and crises as well as leverage new business opportunities. This is because it offers features like:
- Fraud detection
- Risk reduction
- Risk analysis
- Decision making
- Enhancing marketing strategies
- Improving work operations
- Optimizing sales campaigns etc.
It is also used in:
- Customer lifetime values
- Segmentation
- Dynamic pricing
- Customer retention
- B2B analytics etc.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, predictive analysis software proves to be a potent weapon for organizations as it presents before them the supposed future of their success rates by going through historical data. It serves as a vantage point to future success and helps the organizations shape themselves for a better tomorrow. To understand how you could integrate Predictive Analysis Software with other software, read our article on Project Integration Management here!
