Click to learn more about author Kartik Patel.

To be successful in business, every organization must find a way to accurately forecast and predict the future of its market, and its internal operations, and better understand the buying behavior of its customers and prospects. To accurately predict and plan, every enterprise must select a Business Intelligence solution that will support their efforts and provide business users with a rich set of features and tools.

One of the most important elements of advanced data discovery and Advanced Analytics tools is plug n’ play predictive analysis and forecasting tools. These tools can support the enterprise initiative to implement Self-Serve Advanced Analytics and transform business users into Citizen Data Scientists.

Plug n’ Play Predictive Analytics provides easy-to-use tools that require no programming or Data Scientist skills and enable the average business user to leverage sophisticated predictive algorithms so users can confidently plan for success.

Why and how might an enterprise use Plug n’ Play Predictive Analysis? The list of examples is only limited by your imagination and creativity. For example:

• The enterprise might wish to analyze customer churn to discover and predict which customers are likely to move away from the business based on purchasing patterns, buying behavior and demographics, geographic and other macro parameters.
• The enterprise might use Plug n’ Play Predictive Analysis to assess customer acquisition potential and find out if and how a particular customer or a set of customers can be converted from prospect to customer.
• Business users might recommend cross-sales opportunities to discover the next high potential product, promotion or offer for sales conversion, and target customers based on profile and the other products he or she has purchased.
• The business might wish to identify ideal locations for a warehouse, store or branch based on demographics, geography, macro parameters, supply chain and other related parameters.
• The Marketing and Sales teams might want to optimize loyalty programs, using churn analysis, acquisition potential, cross sales and other algorithms to design a loyalty program that offers value to the business and its customers.
• The management team might wish to optimize pricing plans using the prediction engine to recommend the best possible pricing for each product, item and SKU, based on competitive pricing and positioning considerations, and targeted geography and demographics.

Features like time-series forecasting to predict future values, and causation, clustering, and associative algorithms make it easier for business users to analyze and plan at an advanced level like a Data Scientist but without the need for Data Scientist skills.

With Plug n’ Play Predictive Analysis business users can consider hypothesis of various scenarios and, if necessary, consult a Data Scientists if they need to refine and fine-tune these models.

There are many Business Intelligence solutions that offer analytics and data mining but the potential of Plug n’ Play Predictive Analysis goes beyond simple analytics to provide sophisticated tools and techniques in a self-serve environment that is suitable for every user.

The key to successful advanced data analysis is in the detailed capabilities and ease-of-use provided by tools such as Plug n’ Play Predictive Analysis, and features like Smart Data Visualization and Self-Serve Data Preparation – all of which engage business users in a sophisticated process without requiring complex knowledge and skills.