If you've been reading our blog for a while, you've probably noticed that we mention prescriptive analytics quite a lot in our posts. It's the final phase of Business Analytics and has become practically essential to effective business planning across a wide range of industries — even healthcare! You'd certainly be hard-pressed to find a highly successful supply chain or manufacturing company that doesn't leverage prescriptive analytics in their planning process. This is how companies are gaining the competitive advantage. Not up-to-speed on prescriptive analytics? Interested in the "hot topics" surrounding prescriptive? Check out our best-of list below.
Six Must-Read Blogs on Prescriptive Analytics
1. How Prescriptive Analytics Delivers on the Promise of Big Data
This post was written by Sergii Shelpuk, a leading expert in deep learning neural networks, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. In it, he discusses exactly what prescriptive analytics is and how brings new, unforeseen possibility to modern businesses and enterprises. "Prescriptive analytics mitigate significant risk in strategic decision making to improve profitability, increase customer satisfaction, and create first-in-market opportunities by leveraging the promise of big data." He then outlines some real-life applications of prescriptive analytics in various industries to achieve improved outcomes.
2. Why Embrace Optimization and Prescriptive Analytics
The author of "Why Embrace Optimization and Prescriptive Analytics", Gary Cokins, a is River Logic Board Director and internationally recognized expert, speaker and author in advanced cost management, enterprise performance systems and risk management systems. The post is basically summarized by the title: Gary discusses the history of business analytics, intelligence and planning and goes into where and why companies need to adopt software solutions that leverage optimization and prescriptive analytics.
3. Prescriptive Analytics in Healthcare
Carlos Centurion, President of River Logic, discusses why healthcare is the perfect industry for the application of prescriptive analytics. He gives several use cases, ranging from operational to strategic planning in healthcare. He mentions that the "more operational use cases can be delivered within weeks, driving multiple times ROIs within 12 months. Tactical applications...deliver very high impact, sometimes approaching 5% of revenue in additional margin..." As for strategic applications, he notes that they are "designed to optimize a future business model while predicting, quantifying and minimizing risk with a new level of understanding."
4. The Surge of Presciptive Analytics
"The Surge of Prescriptive Analytics" was actually a guest post by Carlos Centurion on another popular data analytics site, Dataconomy. In detail, he outlines the benefits of using presriptive in the following business areas: Sales and Operations Planning, Integrated Delivery Network (Healthcare Provider) Optimization and Strategy & Enterprise Optimization in Oil & Gas. He discusses why other methodologies are significantly less powerful yet, for some reason, are still very widely used.
5. How to Spot an Opportunity for Optimization
Prescriptive analytics, also known as optimization, is a very powerful approach that can deliver significant value strategic, tactical and operational use cases in every industry. In this blog post, we discuss how to identify when and where to apply prescriptive analytics in a business. Essentially, it comes down to whether you can define the problem as a constraint model that can be optimized, and determine the differentiated value/insights that can be generated. We outline the appropriate questions to ask and then address problems that are suitable for prescriptive / optimization application.
6. The Journey to Prescriptive Analytics
The final blog post in our series of must-read posts on prescriptive analytics is a commentary piece of the process of moving from more traditional Business Intelligence methods toward modern prescriptive analytics. Designed to give those who have not yet adopted an idea of its value, this piece is a great one for those who have not yet realized the unmatched value of prescriptive analytics in business planning and analytics.
Closing Remarks
At least once a week, we post articles that at the very least mention prescriptive analytics application. To stay up-to-date with related latest case studies, applications and trends, don't forget to subscribe to our blog and newsletter. Stay tuned for more "best-of" posts on optimization, supply chain and planning / analytics!
