Data is there. For years it has been accumulated in the systems with each transaction carried out: purchases, sales, customer registrations, claims, production orders… Also, an almost infinite flow of new unstructured information contained in the emails, in the different means of communication, in specialized sites and even in social networks is added. The big question is: What do we do with all that information? How can we take advantage of it to obtain business value? The answer: big data or, in simpler language, the analysis of large volumes of data.

Getting to know the customers

Its best known use so far is related to the world of sales: consumption patterns are detected, they are combined with the tastes or preferences shown in previous transactions or even detailed in media with unstructured data, such as social networks. After this, personalized proposals are generated with a high probability of conversion.

In retail, it allows predicting customer behavior, arriving with special offers for each interest group and analyzing the hours of greater or lesser circulation in a store to evaluate product display strategies or development of promotions…

It is a fundamental tool to understand and discover buying habits, which generates higher levels of loyalty and engagement by customers, translating ultimately into more sales.

Answering the calls

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Its applications extend to all industries and know practically no limits. In the world of telecommunications, for example, mobile operators can use data for what is called “analysis of feelings”: see what is being said about their brands on social media, evaluate support tickets or complaints and, based on all this information, develop service improvements to increase satisfaction levels, increase reputation, avoid customer flight and even attract those from the competition.

A better quality of life

In the health industry, big data has at least two major fields of application. On one hand, make the administrative management of health centers more efficient. The pandemic exposed more clearly than ever before the importance of hospitals, clinics and sanitariums having the resources – beds, medicines, human capital – at the right time and in the right quantities. Big data can become the key for the entire health system to share those resources in an agile way and with optimal results. 

On the other hand, it is a fundamental ally for the development of medicines and the diagnosis of diseases, especially when combined with machine learning algorithms that can learn from the enormous number of medical trials and records available.

Let’s do it

Big data applications among manufacturing industries know no limits: from its use in predictive maintenance to reduce costs and unscheduled equipment downtime, to the early replacement of defective assets.

It also allows optimal reassignment of tasks to make the most of both physical and human resources, from a monitoring of activities and interactions that allows a deep understanding of the plant operations.

Deliveries in a timely manner

The exponential increase in e-commerce has created enormous challenges for logistics companies, which need to maximize efficiency to win the market, lower costs and meet growing demand. This technology allows them to consider, in each planning, issues such as traffic on the roads or state of the routes, the location of each item at all times, potential shortages at points of sale, fuel consumption for each section, and even sustainability elements and demand predictions such as the amount of carbon dioxide your operations