IT solution providers can endear themselves to CPG clients by bundling NLG tools with Business Intelligence dashboards.
The pandemic impacted businesses in various ways over the past year. Within the consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) industry, for instance, some companies struggled to survive while others experienced never-before-seen spikes in consumer demand.
The transition from responding to the pandemic to recovering and navigating the path forward means that CPG companies must manage several priorities simultaneously:
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Keeping pace with dynamic consumer preferences
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Identifying incremental growth opportunities
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Becoming more agile to pursue opportunities
To be successful, CPGs and retailers must remain consumer-centric and analytics-driven. And research shows that’s what’s happening. Forrester found that, on average, organizations use five BI solutions to extract corporate data from various enterprise tools (e.g., CRM, ERP, financial planning). According to Valuates Reports’ latest research, the global business intelligence and analytics software market size is projected to grow nearly $10 billion ($23.94 billion to $33.77 billion) between 2020 and 2026, at a CAGR of 5.9% during the forecast period.
Per the research, some of the significant factors driving BI and analytics software growth are a growing focus on digital transformation, rising investments in analytics, rising demand for dashboards for data visualization, increased adoption of cloud technologies, and increased data generation.
Traditional BI Dashboards Don’t Tell the Whole Story
While BI tools have been the go-to for enterprises, the fact remains that many data initiatives fail to reach their potential because of the massive amount of spreadsheets and reports data scientists must read through and decipher before presenting actionable takeaways for the business. The problem is that new trends emerge quickly — especially in CPG and retail.
Waiting for teams to present their findings means lost revenue opportunities.
Where companies are gaining an edge (and where VARs, systems integrators and MSPs can help their clients) is by augmenting BI platforms with embedded, no-code AI that accelerate data understanding and informed decision-making. Augmented analytics comprises machine learning and various artificial intelligence technologies such as natural language generation (NLG) to assist with data preparation, insight generation and insight explanation to supplement how people explore and analyze data in analytics and BI platforms.
Companies like Arria NLG, for example, enhance Power BI dashboard users with visuals supported by data explanations in natural language. These intelligent narratives deliver clear, written summaries of data insights to viewers of the dashboards throughout the organization, enabling actionable insights with user-configurable, out-of-the-box narratives.
In a recent Power BI blog, Microsoft Power BI Program Manager Jeroen ter Heerdt adds, “Arria’s narrative capabilities support your dashboard’s visuals — and describe the underlying data — with expertly written short-form summaries or long-form reports. [It enables you to] drill down into all your dashboard’s underlying data to tap into insights that you might otherwise miss.”
NLG Takes Analytics Beyond Insights
NLG is the component of augmented analytics that translates a machine’s findings into words and phrases that humans can understand. Specifically, NLG focuses on data analysis output. When a system finds that sales are down in a particular category, for example, NLG enables the system to reveal: “Sales in Category A declined by 23 percent over the previous month.”
NLG is a vital partner to machine learning because it enables the average, non-technical person to understand what’s occurring in an enterprise’s growing volume of data. This democratization of data is not just about communicating data trends effectively; it’s about transforming intangible algorithms into real answers, presented in a way that humans can understand.
That said, the value of natural language isn’t solely limited to generating insights. Some augmented analytics platforms apply natural language to their search functions so users can ask questions like “What were sales in August 2020 by category?” and receive an answer in the form of a visualization.
How Augmented Analytics Can Help Pharma CPGs in 2021
The pandemic severely disrupted pharma supply chains, leading to 118 FDA-reported drug shortages in August 2020. Of the 118 drugs, 55 were related to an increase in demand, 16 to API (active pharmaceutical ingredients) insufficiency and 8 to manufacturing or shipping delays.
Without access to data-driven insights and actionable intelligence, (Read full story)
Content courtesy of JMRConnect