Predictive Analytics holds great potential for businesses, especially when combined with Small Data. It helps business experts make enlightened, data-driven decisions with fast and actionable insights. But why stop there? Why not use solutions that not only predict the future but also let you explore different options and help you choose the best one?
Enter Prescriptive Analytics, the next step for Data Analytics and efficient Decision-Making.
What you can do to make things happen
If we describe Predictive Analytics as “what will happen”, then Prescriptive Analytics are “what you can do to make it happen”. They not only use Machine Learning to predict the future but also give different recommendations on how to achieve specific business outcomes.
The benefits are multiple for companies and business experts:
- Reduce human bias: data-driven analyses usually reduce mistakes due to beliefs and biases. Prescriptive Analytics narrow even further the risk of mistakes by giving recommendations and strategies to make informed decisions.
- Quicker impact assessment: When business experts must make a decision, they need to assess what impact it will have. What-if analyses and solver let users try different scenarios, understand the correlation between various inputs and find the best solution.
- Less overthinking: Prescriptive Analytics insights and recommendations give business experts a choice of actions to perform. Rather than weighing pros and cons of every piece of data they have, they can directly move to operations and focus on what they are good at because it’s shown to them.
MyDataModels’ solution for Prescriptive Analytics
Prescriptive Analytics have a lot to do with Explainable AI. To be efficient, Prescriptive Analytics insights must be understandable by everyone, which is the core concept of Explainable AI. Hence, Prescriptive solutions need to integrate such approaches to be efficient for Business Experts.
This is why ZGP, our in-house algorithm, makes Prescriptive Analytics accessible to the majority of business experts in any department. ZGP has been designed for Predictive Analytics, meaning that it focuses on predicting future outcomes based on past data.
However, as explained in our previous article, ZGP models are short and understandable mathematical formulas with a great accuracy. It means that they can work well on Small Data and, more importantly, users understand how variables impact the outcome. Consequently, these formulas are flexible enough to adapt to new inputs and project their potential outcomes. Their transparency also allows users to understand the dependencies between inputs to navigate between scenarios and find the best solution in minutes.
Prescriptive Analytics in action
We recently worked with an Automotive parts manufacturer that documents every step of a product production. Quality Assurance then ensures that the parts are compliant and labels them accordingly. However, they were having some issues with identifying what caused the malfunctions of some of the parts. ZGP was able to identify in minutes the three main factors why pieces were not compliant and built some combinations of settings to improve the results.
These what-if scenarios have proven themselves highly valuable for many of MyDataModels’ customers, from R&D optimization to quality assurance and customer satisfaction. Starting from only 300-rows, 15-column spreadsheets, they were able to find innovative solutions to grow their business, reduce their costs and improve their operational performance with Prescriptive Analytics. Our Decision Intelligence Platforms are here to change your decision-making process, so contact us now for more information!
