“There is an increasing scope for Business Analytics in the industry,” says Harikumar, Assistant Director of Analytics, Ernst & Young. In a colloquium held at the Coimbatore campus, Mr. Harikumar interacted with students of Amrita School of Business, Coimbatore and presented a preview on ‘Business Analytics and its Industry Applications’. He provided students insights on the necessity of Business Analytics, its relevance in various industries and its applications.

“Analytics helps us to explore, analyze and optimize our business offerings to cater to the growing needs of the consumers, clients, vendors and general public. Analytics is subdivided into the areas of descriptive, predictive, prescriptive and forensic analytics,” Harikumar said. Unlike the traditional Business Analytics that focused on arriving at decisions using data, he called for ‘reversing’ the process, from fixing the performance target, and moving backward to arrive at the type of the data necessary achieve the performance target.

“Any business graduate aiming for a career in Analytics must rise above just working with data and the Logic states to working on domain level applications such as Finance, Tax, Customer Intelligence etc.,” he said.

Mr. Harikumar also provided a glimpse through different types of Analytics such as Customer Analytics and Supply Chain Analytics, among others. He presented a live case from the industry and concluded the session with a demo of Spot Fire- a data Visualization application. “A look into the UI of the software gave us a peek into the vast possibilities of data representation and drill down analysis that could be obtained by a business manager,” commented a student from first year MBA.

From the current academic year, Amrita School of Business, Coimbatore offers ‘Business Analytics’ as a new specialization.