Latin America. Currently, information has become the lifeblood of any business. The digitization and subsequent analysis of large volumes of data with the aim of making better business decisions will continue to be a challenge for organizations in Latin America in 2018.
Big Data is a popular term that describes the vast amount of structured and unstructured data that can be extracted to obtain information. Today, leaders of organizations are concerned that the volume of accumulated data is increasing and find it difficult to discover the most important ones. How to detect, analyze and store them efficiently and quickly to gain competitive advantage in the market, are the challenges to consider for the coming year.
The reality is that the use of IT solutions applied to Big Data and analytics create new opportunities for growth, cost and time reduction, development of optimized products and offers/services, and intelligent business decision making.
The three V's of Big Data:
Volume: Several factors contribute to the increase in data volume. Unstructured data collected from social media, transaction-based data, number of sensors, human-to-machine interaction, and machine-to-machine data. Previously, excessive amount of data was a storage problem, but then reducing the cost of storage tends to pose other challenges, such as how to properly analyze the data and how to determine the relevant ones.
Speed: Data is transmitted at an exceptional speed and must be managed conveniently. RFID tags/tags, GPS devices, surveillance cameras, sensors, cell phones, and smart metering are driving the need to manage data flows in real time. Responding quickly to dealing with data velocity is a challenge for most enterprise organizations.
Variety: Data comes in various structured, semi-structured, and unstructured formats. Numerical databases, text documents, audio, video, email, data based on financial transactions, etc. Managing, consolidating, and governing this data is critical.
New business opportunities in the different sectors of the economy:
In 2018, different areas and sectors of the economy will further benefit from the collection, storage and analysis of large amounts of information to drive new forms of economic activity:
• Healthcare: According to some reports, there is an estimated 50 petabytes of data in the healthcare arena. It is predicted to grow, by a factor of 50, to 25,000 petabytes by 2020. Within the healthcare sector, analytics provide all stakeholders with new insights that have the potential to advance personalized care, improve patient outcomes, and avoid unnecessary costs. Today, there are content analytics and health coding solutions such as RICOH Smart Doctor that allows doctors to express themselves naturally through a speech to text solution, provides diagnostic and coding support based on ICD10, ICD9, SNOMED or whatever is required to help correctly structure the clinical note, structures the information to support the reduction of cancellations and allows to mine and analyze the information available in the clinical notes.
• Education: The use of analytics in the education sector will become increasingly important for the profitability of both public and private universities. Analytics solutions allow you to create, for example, a library of quantitative information on student and class performance. When data is tracked and analyzed over time, trends can be determined and opportunities can be found to improve the design of exams or tests. For example, teachers can identify questions that are poorly worded or see which questions are more or less accurate by students. With this, the curriculum can be adjusted accordingly.
In particular, with Ricoh's analytics solution for the education sector, you can get students' answers, both right and wrong, much faster. Since the scores can go directly from the grading software to the student information system, the teacher will have all the grading information quickly and easily.
• Human Resources: There is a wide potential for action in general, from improving or enriching the dashboards, to predicting future behaviors or actions depending on the scenarios that occur on a day-to-day basis. Intelligence also contributes in a differential way to provide solutions to problems of daily operations. Examples such as contrasting the managerial quality of managers and analyzing the correlation with the achievement of differential results, or being able to predict recruitment needs in areas with high seasonality, turnover and absenteeism, are already possible with analytics.
• Payments and collections area: The payment and collection of invoices can be simple and efficient if the correct processes are used. With the right technology, paper and electronic invoices are first redirected to a Business Information Service Center where they are opened, sorted, and scanned. The electronic data is then automatically verified and processed using configurable rules-based pairing. Exceptions are redirected to the AP department for resolution and approvals are automatically integrated into the ERP, allowing the human team to be focused on the core business. Why change the process to adapt to the software? Ricoh's accounts receivable solution starts with an assessment and analysis of the current workflow, and develops a model to meet needs. A custom invoice portal is also created for the Accounts Receivable department in order to securely store all invoices and related documents, and handle customer inquiries and resolutions.
• Retail: The challenge in 2018 for this sector is based on combining technologies to offer omnichannel. The integration of channels such as customer service, interaction in mobile environments, online sales, in-store technology and customer knowledge are the strategic axes to generate business and satisfaction. In the store environment, Ricoh integrates the most innovative solutions of its own and its technological partners, combining aspects such as Social WiFi, WiFi Analytics, Video Analytics, Digital Signage or Beacon technology, all aimed at obtaining information about customer behavior in the store and acting accordingly. These solutions allow from creating a network of audiovisual systems with updated content, to developing a facial recognition application that allows to adjust the message broadcast on the screen to consumers who pass in front of the ad, interacting with them and increasing, therefore, the conversion ratio street / store / area / box. In this way, the client perceives the brand as closer and concerned about their interests, in short, more relevant to their particular interests.
Final Thoughts
Big Data technologies have gone from being a simple concept to becoming a topic of discussion at the moment when companies consider making the information they accumulate more efficient. 2018 will be the year in which data management solutions, together with advanced analytical systems, will have an exponential growth in their business applications to increase the competitiveness of companies by converting data into information that facilitates decision making.
RICOH offers the design of customized solutions for data acquisition, monitoring, control and integration from various sensors, industrial and commercial processes to an analysis platform capable of performing predictive models for the generation of useful information for decision making in any business.
Text written by Antonio Catale, Director of Ricoh Services & Solutions at Ricoh Latin America.
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