The term ‘Business Analytics‘ (BA) is used in many different contexts. Be it specific skills, software applications or business practices they all share a common theme which is being able to analyse and explore data in an iterative fashion by using drill down, filters and often measuring against specific key performance indicator (KPI’s).
We are not just talking about static reporting here, BA is the process that we use to really dig deep into a datasets to find new trends by investigating historical information and in some cases applying statistical methods to drive out possible future projections.
It is this type of reporting that help some of the best companies in the world to understand their own market trends and plan strategic goals for the future to enable them to stay ahead of their competitors.
SAP has a rich software tool set that businesses use to carry out their business analytic processes of which the SAP BEx Analyzer is still the most popular.