EY says Indian firms are more analytics savvy

BENGALURU: Indian companies are adept at incorporating analytics on top of their business units and are more open to adopting analytics-driven business decisions as compared to the global counterparts.

"The average commitment of top management in Indian companies towards the analytics is by far much higher than the global average. Indian executives are upbeat about using analytics in leveraging it for decision making," said Beatriz Sanz Saiz, Global Advisory Analytics Leader, EY.

Data analytics refers to making sense of large chunks of raw data, analysing them and finding patterns and hidden insights. The advanced analytics insights helps organisations make critical business decisions. For instance, compliance with government regulations is a tedious task for corporations when they have operations across geographies.EY uses a regulation compliance smart robots to find smart solutions to regulatory problems. "The bot can read multiple external sources and find the changes in tax for specific regulations. We have smart robots going through documents so that the clients do not waste time by going through bulky government files," Saiz said, adding, "Instead, they can concentrate on executing the changes in the regulation".

A report published by EY in collaboration with Forbes surveyed nearly 200 Indian companies in 2016 and found nearly half of Indian firms already have an enterprise-wide advanced analytics strategy.

"The areas where analytics is largely used is sales and marketing, but the largest adopter of analytics this year has been HR and talent acquisition," Saiz said, adding, "In terms of indu stries, Retail and Consumer products, Financial services and life sciences are the largest adopters." In terms of geography, India occupies the third spot in the adoption of analytics worldwide. The US which occupied the top spot last year was replaced by China in 2017.

Organisations are increasingly realising that unless they infuse analytics within the functions in a significant way they cannot drive decisions, said Gautam Bhattacharya, Partner and National Analytics Leader at EY India. The report says that over the next two years, nearly three-quarters of them plan to invest $10 million or more for data and analytics resources.

"The inclination towards analytics comes not only from the private sector but by public sector as well. The Indian government has shown great interest in adopting analytics," Bhattacharya added.