The hidden AI button that gives your company the power to be self-driven

Have you ever tried to drive your car forward relying on only the rear-view mirrors? Please don’t try this, as it would be difficult – if not impossible – to avoid a major accident. Yet your business is in a similar situation if you’re relying only on your ERP system to power it forward. ERP systems are great at showing your company’s past data.

Business Intelligence (BI) system(s), on the other hand, can display your car’s dashboard (as well as the rear-view mirrors) and will show you your data transparently and parsed in many different ways. It’s better than using just those three mirrors, but it won’t show your future – the road ahead – unless you’re using the prediction feature embedded in your BI software.

This is not too much to ask of BI software.

After all, you’re looking for predictions all the time. When you tap the weather app on your phone you probably aren’t looking for the weather at that moment, but you’re checking out the future temperature and whether it will be raining or not in the next few hours. Meanwhile, your social media app will predict and suggest possible friends for you to connect with, and your car’s lane keeping assist system (LKAS) will help guide you to safety when it senses you may be headed off the road.

 

So why don’t you expect similar things from your business management systems?
Let’s look at how the prediction module works. Every morning you wake up 6:00 am, take a shower, dress for the day, do a meditation, eat breakfast, brush your teeth, get in your car and head to the school with your child. This is your daily morning routine and you rarely deviate from it on weekday mornings. If the weekends are different, they set a unique pattern too. You might not wake up at 6:00 and you’re probably not taking your child to school. Based on this past data we can predict your getting-up time in the future, depending on what day of the week it is.

Your business has similar routines, which are recorded by the business data on your servers. Whether they’re patterns concerning your inventory or production, patterns relating to your client’s behavior or any number of other important patterns, your ERP is constantly collecting detailed data on them. Machine learning algorithms then find the patterns in your orders, raw material prices and invoices. They also find correlations with the external data (e.g. day of the week), and based on these patterns, can predict the future.

That’s why your data is valuable gold that’s hidden just under the surface; your IT team understands this. And while it’s extremely lucrative to tap, you need the right tool to mine this data or it’s worthless.

Statistical software can help you uncover this gold. These programs let you choose the appropriate algorithms and build up your own prediction system – if you have a month or two to learn the math in the background. So while this software is effective, the learning curve can be steep and the work to mine your gold quite difficult.

If you don’t have the time to master a new system, you can use a self-service system, like Dyntell Bi. With just a few clicks, you can create predictions and turn your data into the pure gold it’s meant to be.

The sophisticated software is easy to use, and it processes your data using a unique two-pronged method that runs both classical and deep learning algorithms in the background. Both are correlated with other time-series data, and then Dyntell Bi chooses the most effective method to make the prediction in each situation, in order to get the most accurate results. Armed with this knowledge, you can make better decisions now and also better prepare your company for the future.

 

Prediction capabilities are not 100% accurate –  yet
Without a time machine we can’t know the future for sure, but we can get pretty darn close. Going back to our earlier example, if it’s Labor Day Monday morning and I’ve only tracked a few months of data, I would probably guess your waking time to be 6:00 am, and I’ll (most likely) be wrong. So the more data that’s available to mine, the more likely the success of the prediction. Like one of the most influential physicists (and Nobel Prize winner) of the last century noted, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Niels Bohr

Want to see how to leverage the power of prediction for your business? You can push the AI button here.