As stated in my earlier publication on Data Analytics: Panacea for SMEs Challenges, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria are confronted with various challenges that militated against the maximisation of its contribution to nation’s growth. The Government, in response to this, have tried to intervene by the creation of agencies to support the SMEs in order for them to play strategic role in economic growth and stability.
It is obvious that the challenges that confront SMEs over the years have been inadequately diagnose, hence, the reason why only financial support has not been very effective in the sustainability of SMEs. SMEs operators make several decisions concerning their businesses on a daily basis. Today’s business environment is very complex, the market forces and other factors that play out in both internal and external environment have constantly throw out data that require interpretation for the purpose of decision making. Uncertainty has become the norm and business operators have to continually make decisions in order to keep business alive. One of the technical skills require to guide the decisions of SME operators is data analytics skills.
What is Data Analytics?
Data analytics, simply put is the extraction of meaning from raw data using specialised skills and tools. Data analytics helps to transform, organize, and model data to draw conclusions and identify patterns and make decisions. SMEs operators require technical ability to be able to make sense of myriad data that they have in order to logical decision that would lead to the sustainability of their businesses.
With the right skill, data analytics can do wonders. Small businesses can reduce operational costs, improve their business model, increase revenue, and stand out amongst the competition when data are properly analysed.
Importance of data analytics to SMEs
1, It helps in the creating operational efficiency
2, It helps in understanding the market and the market forces
3, It enables SME operators to concentrate effort in a particular business direction
4 ,It facilitates financial processes
5, It will enable business operators to chat a profitable customer journey within its eco-system
6 It will help in the improvement of business inventory
7. It gives insights into what consumers want and allows business operator to track them down and promote them using the right communication medium.
The ability to use data analytics effectively will enable SMEs to view all business variables and constants into statistical figures and subjecting it logical interpretations. For example, the use of statistical tools like; Mean, mode, median, variance, standard deviation etc. enable the SMEs to take precise decisions and statistical tools like probability etc, enable SMEs to take decisions based on possible outcome of interplay of market forces.
So, how does data analytic skills using statistical tools help in business decision making? How can SMEs operators make sense of the outcome of statistical data like Probability, mean, standard deviation etc, in their quest for business sustainability?. The next publication promises to explain how..
Watch out.
