Make better decisions with Aha! business-embedded analytics
Aha! offers Axel, a complete business analytics system. Axel is driven by a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) model hierarchy, which extends from strategic measures down to tactical and operational performance.
Axel models your business data—CRM data, customer service and billing data, campaign data, social network data, or web analytics—using advanced statistical and mathematical simulation techniques. The resulting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business become the basis of your Axel Analytics System.
Axel displays KPIs and predictive business modeling and drives decision-making based on real-time business conditions and results. And the Axel closed-loop system of data-to-decision continually incorporates feedback and produces dynamic, responsive models. Decision-making is no longer reactive, based on the rear-view mirror view, but is optimized, automated, data-driven, and keyed to what’s best for your business right now.
The case for analytics
Business today operates in a dynamic and uncertain global environment. And the flood of scattered, often random data that pours in each day compounds the complexity of business decision making. Business intelligence (BI) collects and structures that data, and data warehousing stores it—but how can data and the business wisdom it contains be used to optimize business operations?
Unlike BI, analytics provides the applications, techniques, and technologies for understanding performance drivers in an organization and for implementing fact-based, model-driven decision-making. Analytics focuses on extrapolating trends and making predictions and on enabling actionable insights that can drive decision-making.
An effective analytics system is integrated throughout the enterprise to enable model-based decisions and connect business users at every level—strategic, tactical, and operational—with business data. To achieve its transformative potential, modern analytics must not be confined to power users but must be accessible to employees on the front lines who interact with customers and make operational decisions every day—analytics must be business-embedded.
While this potential is ignored by some 93 percent of businesses today, enterprises are recognizing that analytics will be the operational heart of a competitive and successful business in an interconnected world characterized by massive information access, a demanding customer base, scarcity of capital, shifting distribution channels, a mobile work force, and intense cost competition.
What does an effective analytics system look like?
For true business optimization, any analytics system must be:
- Relevant: The full range of analytics must be available to users as business process-based key performance indicator (KPI) models.
- Near real time: Business users need current data to forecast, predict, and model outcomes and to take action when the business needs it.
- Able to unite strategy with operational execution: Views and the interrelationships of strategy to analytics-based KPIs must be combined in a single data-driven taxonomy to provide the basis for collaboration from executive management to the call center and back again.
- Closed-loop: Predictive analytic models must be used in a closed loop, from business process to analytics-driven action, to continually validate and recalibrate predictive models.
- Self-service and adaptive: The analytics system must provide business users throughout an enterprise easy-to-use, secure, interactive graphical data presentation and decision automation.
The Axel analytics solution from Aha!
Axel is a new generation services platform that embeds analytics within the business to let the business understand and use data and KPIs in near real time to optimize business performance.
- Axel provides a platform that measures business performance and enables model-based decision-making.
- Axel establishes KPI (key performance indicator) models of your business and key processes in viewable and actionable KPIs.
- Users can create customized views of KPI models to support individual needs.
- An analytics expressions language (Aha! Expressions) lets you easily create KPI models of your business processes.
- Click-to-forecast and click-to-data functions let all business users rapidly analyze data trends and variances and forecast future KPI values based on historical performance.
- Predictor views of KPIs can perform quick “what-if” analysis of the effect of business changes on the entire business process.
- Rapid use of simulation, optimization, or scoring models enables click-to-model capability.
- Self-service customizable dashboards allow continuous reporting and viewing of summary results.
- Axel is accessed as a SaaS (Software as a Service) instance, which increases collaboration across geographic and organizational boundaries.
- The SaaS delivery option minimizes the impact on scarce IT resources.
Why is Axel different?
Axel is a new generation of predictive analytics that places unprecedented power in the hands of the business decision-maker:
| Current Analytics Offerings | Business-Embedded Analytics |
|---|---|
| Dominated by tooling targeted to power users | Self-service, collaborative business process-based modeling |
| Static, separated from the business processes, and not actionable | Actionable, near-real-time analytics: click to forecast, click to model |
| Do not close the loop with business outcomes | Closes the loop between analytics and actions, and produces competitive business outcomes |
- Aha! has deployed full predictive and advanced Axel analytics in production in 60 to 120 days, slashing previous timeframes of a year or more and dramatically lowering costs.
- Axel’s power can be made available to business users at all levels, from executive management to power users to the call-center employees who make daily front-line operational decisions.
- Axel leverages the KPIs you define to manage your business and displays KPIs in near real time in the form of bullet graphs showing the maximum, minimum, average, current, and goal values of each KPI. By evaluating KPI relationships at a glance, including self-service customized views, insight is available to analytics anomalies and their cause-and-effect relationships.
- The Aha! Expressions language makes KPI and goal development fast and easy. With Aha! Expressions, the business user defines the KPIs needed for optimum insight into business operations and builds models that incorporate appropriate current and historical values.
- The Axel Analyzer shows how the business is affected by any KPI change: by manually changing metrics and KPIs, you can immediately see their effect across all KPIs in the model. Price changes, marketing campaigns, new product introductions, and other business events can be “what-if”ed for immediate high-impact viewing.
- Dashboards can show bottom-line summaries and colorful bar charts, dials, and bulbs related to specified goals. Dashboards are checkbox customizable. They show all data continuously and are unique to each individual user to accommodate individual preferences.
