Written by Alan Jacobson
On any given day, you probably have a suite of analytic products, services, and tools to help you dive into your data. While they’re all great at what they do, they don’t automatically lead to insights that drive quick wins, fast ROI, and new business models. And that’s okay.
Spreadsheets, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), data visualization, and other data tools weren’t built for transforming the entire data analytic process. They were built for speeding up different parts of the process. They have a role and they serve it well.
But you need data that leads to quick wins and fast ROI. You need something that can solve your problems end-to-end and transform your business.
You need Analytic Process Automation (APA).
What is Analytic Process Automation?
APA isn’t RPA or Business Process Automation (BPA), and it isn’t a data tool, either. It’s an automated, self-service data analytics platform that focuses on business outcomes first while empowering everyone in your organization to adopt a culture of analytics. It allows you and anyone else in your organization to perform advanced analytics whether or not they know any code and whether or not they’re trained in data science. Analytic Process Automation (APA) describes a unified platform for self-service data analytics that makes data easily available and accessible to everyone in your organization, optimizes and automates data analytics and data science processes, and empowers your entire organization to develop skills and make informed decisions using machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and predictive and prescriptive analytics.
Think of Analytic Process Automation as an all-in-one supercharged data analytics machine. If all you want to do is clean up some data, you can do that. If you want to merge multiple different data types, you can do that, too. If you want to automate month-long tedious and complex data tasks and push those outputs to decision-makers and business processes, you got it.
If you want advanced analytics that provide forward-looking insights you can use to produce better business outcomes, improve revenue, reduce spending, and transform your organization from the ground up, then you need it.
And once you’ve created that first solution that works, you can put it on a schedule and let it repeat on an ongoing basis. I wonder where you’ll be as it runs? In bed? At the beach?
How Analytic Process Automation Works
One of my favorite ways of explaining how APA works is using jet airplanes. Imagine for a moment that you’re in a race. You need to get from one side of the country to the other. The first person to arrive wins a million dollars.
Now, there are multiple ways to get there. You could crawl. You could walk. You could hop, ride a bike, skateboard, hitchhike, drive your car, take the train.
Or, you could take a jet.
You already know which of these would win in terms of speed. I don’t need to explain that to you. But what if, for this competition, you had to be the one in complete control of whichever means of transportation you took? Which of these would you feel most comfortable taking then?
Suddenly, driving a car seems like the best option.
But imagine that you have a jet that you can learn to use over lunch and start flying the same day. Not only would you win but, the more you did this, the more you would learn about flying. No, you wouldn’t be as skilled as a ten year veteran flying jets, but you could still get from point A to point B using the same vehicle.
That’s Analytic Process Automation. Except, instead of traveling, it’s data. And, instead of competing with others to win a prize, you’re competing for business and customers.
APA automates your analytics process. You still have to pick the data you want to use and the answers you want to get, but it does everything else. You can import multiple and different datasets, clean it up, prep it, perform predictive and prescriptive analytics using it, export the data into multiple reporting formats, and share it with anyone in your organization.
Not just you, either. Everyone. Every manager, director, line-of-business leader, and C-suite executive in every department. When you have a whole company working together to solve challenges with data, and using an analytics jet to do it, you have a whole company that’s producing quick wins and fast ROI.
ROI with APA
As I mentioned before, Analytic Process Automation puts business outcomes first, especially top-line revenue and bottom-line growth. And companies see results fast, too. 86% of those that have implemented APA within their organizations have produced business results within two weeks.
When’s the last time you brought in something new to help with data analytics and produce positive business results within two weeks?
Part of the reason so many businesses struggle to produce ROI is that they bring in tools that only a few people can use and that take months or even years to set up. Analytic Process Automation opens the door to everyone. It empowers everyone in your organization to learn a new, vital skill — data analytics.
Often the reason people don’t use data to drive their decisions is because they don’t have the means to grab it themselves. Instead of creating that next marketing campaign based on future-looking data, they’re basing it off past experience or a months-old report.
With Analytic Process Automation, as more people within the organization learn how to use data analytics and realize benefits from it, they become empowered to contribute. That leads to a culture of analytics, which leads to successful digital transformation.
Analytic Process Automation in Action
Because of how versatile Analytic Process Automation is, the use cases are nearly endless. Companies across all industries and in every department are already seeing success in the form of top-line growth, bottom-line returns, efficiency gains, and perpetual upskilling of the workforce. See how Coca-Cola and PwC accelerated their analytics transformation with Analytic Process Automation.
I’d like to highlight a few that showcase just how powerful the platform is.
- A top 5 retailer optimized merchandizing efforts for 100% of SKUs across over 12,000 stores, automated daily merchandising, including pricing and assortment, resulting in an increase of $1.5 billion in sales, not to mention millions of customers who were happy to find the product they wanted was in stock.
- A top 3 airline optimized their customer loyalty program and returned $80 million to the bottom-line through the discovery of unused credits.
- A large, national retailer was able to reduce parcel delivery and inbound freight costs by 11% while also producing a 99.4% on-time delivery rate.
- A healthcare provider saved $20 million on their bottom line when they reduced unwarranted clinical variations.
All of this was accomplished through Analytic Process Automation. Imagine what you could do if you increased sales while reducing costs and making your customers happy. Marketing departments could identify the right people to target. HR could identify key factors in attracting and retaining good employees. Colleges could use it to better identify and recruit the right students. Stores could ensure their customers could always find the right product.
Analytic Process Automation isn’t a spreadsheet. It isn’t a data visualization tool. It isn’t RPA. It isn’t any one thing. It’s all of them. It’s a jet. Every step automated, every step self-service, every step designed for multiple purposes. It puts business outcomes first, drives wins and ROI, and transforms your business by empowering the one source of innovation that’s more important than anything else — a workforce entrenched in a culture of analytics.
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Take a deeper dive into how pairing APA with RPA fully automates your processes and see live examples of how UiPath and Alteryx are making companies better and faster, and thus, more competitive.