A successful business needs to identify the root cause of events and why trends appear the way they do. Diagnostic Analytics is a tool that allows a business to achieve this. Businesses use it to help them understand trends and anomalies. Suppose a business experiences a drop in revenue, a sudden change in customer behavior, or a huge rise in business expenses.
In that case, diagnostic analytics will come in handy at this point.
What is Diagnostic Analytics?
Diagnostics analytics tend to highlight the methods you use to ask for your data; why did this happen? The tool allows you to dive deeply into your data while searching for valuable insights. Businesses use diagnostic analytics to identify the cause of trends and correlations among business variables. Further, you may conduct this on either manually or through an algorithm.
How does Diagnostic Analytics Work?
Diagnostics analytics help determine the root cause of a problem. First, diagnostics analytics identifies anomalies. When businesses conduct descriptive analysis, they may identify trends or anomalies. It determines whether the results from these levels show an actual departure from the norm.
The next step involves the identification of the data that explains these anomalies. This process is known as data discovery. It involves gathering external data while drilling into internal data. At this point, the data shows changes in the supply chain or weather patterns that are the reason behind the anomalous data.
In the last stage, diagnostics analytics provides insights into the associations in data points showing the anomaly. Two events correlating may not exactly mean they cause each other. The system considers a deep analysis of causative factors.
Various Benefits for Your Business
There are varying benefits of implementing diagnostics analytics for a business organization. Embracing diagnostics analytics in your business model offers you incredible insights into new opportunities and shows you the business's challenges.
A well-managed diagnostics analytics program helps a business turn complex data into manageable and understandable information. It presents the data in a language that businesspeople may understand and interpret for decision-making.
Thus, this allows you to see where you stand in the market through a detailed business landscape.
How can Diagnostic Analytics help your Business?
Identifying anomalies
It is easy to miss anomalies in data collection. In this case, diagnostic analytics come in handy. A business that uses diagnostic analytics in its model can get ahead of the game and prevent possible issues from happening. An analytic tool will connect disparate systems in the business and make data sensible. Further, it allows you to avoid costly mistakes, improving business efficiency.
Greater insights
With business diagnostic analytics in place, you can put more effort into areas that demand more attention. This information helps you make informed decisions on allocating resources across business departments and projects to enhance overall business growth.
Forming and testing the hypothesis
Developing this lets you create a hypothesis from your product's reception and testing. This is how you can make an informed decision on your next course of action. Many businesses use the information to improve product performance while reducing the cost of unnecessary failures during the testing phase.
For a new product, diagnostic analytics allows you to understand how customers will receive your product before using it. If the analysis shows more complaints, you should wait and act on the complaints before releasing the product to the market.
Avoiding future mistakes
Business mistakes can be very costly and dangerous. Working diagnostic analytics helps you prevent such mistakes before they occur. In the case of missed calls from customers with missing or delayed deliveries, diagnostic analytics helps you figure out why this happens and how to develop a solution. On the bottom line, your business will not lose customers because of delayed deliveries.
A correctly implemented system help you avoid future mistakes by addressing them now. You do not have to deal with missed opportunities or costly repairs and incidents. Check out diagnostic analytics trends and look for red flags that could indicate potential problems with your product or service.
Different Use Cases in Your Business
Once you collect and analyze data, the next step is understanding why it happened. Diagnostic analytics will help you understand the specific events that led to the undesired outcome. Everyday use cases of diagnostic analytics include;
Marketing and sales
This allows you to correlate aspects of marketing campaigns and sales data. This way, you understand what worked and what did not. You will get answers to the following questions:
- Why sales dropped in the first three months of the year?
- Why did customer subscriptions from this group low compared to other groups?
- Why did the recent promotion produce a 40% increase in sales when it usually led to 15% growth?
Detecting anomalies
This also helps you better address performance opportunities and makes it easy to detect fraud cases in the business. An analytic look deals with the root causes of different issues while correlating with less known variables. The analytics answer the following questions:
- Why did the market fall off suddenly?
- Why is the adoption of customers high?
- What is the cause of system downtime at the end of the month?
Useful Examples of Diagnostic Analytics
Health care
A medical facility may use diagnostic analytics to support healthcare functions. While the descriptive analysis in health care may answer questions about how many patients were admitted to a hospital and how many returned, diagnostic analytics compares the historical trends while detecting anomalies.
Diagnostic analytics will ask questions like: did the hospital revenue coincide with the time the patients went home?
Manufacturing
Diagnostic analytics will help examine the machine logs and frequency of updates for machinery with intermittent failures to determine where the problem rests. The manufacturing sector benefits greatly while using diagnostic analytics, which helps eliminate the underlying problem.
Results
Every trend or event in business performance is due to several contributing factors. Diagnostic analytics has a wide range of benefits that depict your business performance. From this assessment, use the factors that have the most significant influence and focus on them to go deeper with drill-down and correlations. Further, use external datasets that will help supplement your analysis.
Bottomline for Diagnostic Analytics
This is a great tool that helps you analyze data quickly and accurately. Further, a business can identify the data flow and detect fraud and failures before they happen. Diagnostic analytics will improve the quality of collected and stored data and boost business performance.
DashboardFox and Diagnostic Analytics: How We Can Help
We’re not going to over pitch Dashboardfox; we don’t have any automated or magical way to detect anomalies in your data. But where we do shine, we make it really easy (and affordable) to connect to your data (or even join multiple sources of data) and pull the data set you need to get started.
DashboardFox makes it easy to unlock the data you have stored away and securely put it in the hands of your team, so they can dive in deeper. From a report/dashboard perspective, this could be as simple as aggregating your data across time values or categories and converting them into visualizations like a bar or line chart to see where something looks out of wack. Then allowing the ability to drill down and see why things don’t quite match the other period/categories.
That’s data analytics 101 and DashboardFox does that very well.
But DashboardFox also makes it easy to give your data analysts live and easy access to pull data sets that they can use in the tool of their choice, to run their diagnostic analysis and do more automated discovery tasks. And when they have results, they can import that data back in via DashboardFox or stored in their internal database and DashboardFox can share the results with everyone who needs to know.
And, because DashboardFox can save you a lot of money on the presentation layer side of your BI stack, that leaves more money for you to focus on the more important “people” side. We offer DashboardFox on a one-time subscription pricing model, so pay once and use it all you can. Isn’t that amazing?
Check us out using the free live demo sessions we offer so generously or set a meeting with us to discuss how we can make things work. We’ll be waiting!