Contemporary Applications of Big Data in Business

 

Because of the proliferation of data and Big Data technologies in today’s world, Big Data is having a big impact of many areas of todays society. Modern Businesses are using Big Data in many ways:

Enhancing Customer Experience – Businesses can take advantage of big data to provide customers with a better experience through personalized marketing and customer analytics. Personalized marketing allows businesses to understand individual customers preferences and behaviour better to tailor their marketing better to provide customers with what they want. Customer analytics allow businesses to understand the customers in their market better and tailor services and products to improve their businesses.

Improving Operations – Big Data can be used by business to make their supply chains more efficient by identifying areas that can be improved and reduce waste through out the chain. Big Data can be incorporated into decision making processes to help businesses reduce risk while still trying to improve and evolve. Big data can also be used to identify fraud by identifying patterns and anomalies in transaction data to highlight suspect occurrences.

Predicting Business – Big Data can be used by businesses to make educated guesses about the future. Using Big Data analyses, businesses can predict changes in product demand throughout the year, adjust prices based on a range of factors analysed by Big Data, and adjust inventory based on predictions made.

(1)

One example of this is airports. One major U.S. airline used Big Data to make predictions about plane landing times. Initially this was done using ETAs provided by pilots as they were coming into land. This was inefficient as this was prone to human error meaning sometimes ground crews were not ready as the plane landed earlier than expected or the plane landed later, and staff sat idle waiting for the plane. A company called PASSUR Aerospace provided a Big Data solution to virtually eliminate gaps between estimated and actual arrival times and improved efficiency.

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1.      https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/The-ultimate-guide-to-big-data-for-businesses

2.      https://hbr.org/2012/10/big-data-the-management-revolution

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