Data Analytics: Where to Start?

At the heart of every successful business and organization is the underlying data within the entity’s operating system.  Data has been, is and will continually be a key component to shaping financial decisions and building better businesses.  As data analysis becomes increasingly important, many small-to-medium-sized companies struggle  with their initial steps in corralling the data and making it useful for analysis.

To ready the data for analysis, companies must first gather and ‘clean’ the data, ultimately putting it through the ‘extract, transform and load’ (ETL) process.  The extraction of data is the process of pulling the necessary information to be used for analysis regardless of source or system.  Upon the gathering of the data, the transformation takes place.  Depending on the data sources and underlying system, this process can consist of filtering, cleaning, joining or sorting the data.  This transformation will allow the data to be loaded into the applicable analytics or visualization tool —Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Solver, Alteryx, etc.

Once the data has been loaded and is ready to be analyzed, the possibilities are endless.  In addition to providing for better statistical analyses and projections, data analytics can allow companies and organizations to make internal processes more efficient, focus on value-added tasks, and have timely access to real-time data. 

In an ever-changing business environment, if you feel that your company could benefit from better data warehousing, analysis and analytical technique, don’t hesitate to contact a member of our automation and data analytics process team:

Matt Kraemer - [email protected]

Chris Kosty - [email protected]

Robert Morgan - [email protected]