Title: Big data analytics bring new insights and higher business value - an experiment carried out to divulge sales forecasting solutions

Authors: Shanmugasundaram Palanimalai; Ilango Paramasivam

Addresses: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, India ' School of Computing Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore – 632014, India

Abstract: Over the last few years, the volume and the variety of data that we deal has grown enormously from various sources such as social media networks, machine generated data, mobile networks, CRM data etc. The exponential growth of data creates various challenges to the traditional business intelligence (BI) and analytic solutions. Newer approaches to handle Big data and extract better business value are the topmost priorities for both IT management and business users. In recent years, organisations have made strategic decisions using Big data analytics, which have resulted in better business processes, minimise risks, reduce costs and increase business value in broad-spectrum. In this paper, we epitomise Big data analytics and the promising technologies to analyse Big data. We have also experimented predictive analytics to evaluate the sales forecasting trend and enrich customer relationship management (CRM) data with all the obtainable insights. This experiment has been executed for a pharmaceutical company using SFDC (SalesForce.Com) in cloud environment.

Keywords: big data analytics; business value; sales forecasting; sales patterns; customer relationship management; CRM data; pharmaceutical industry; cloud computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAIP.2016.075728

International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, 2016 Vol.8 No.2, pp.207 - 218

Received: 08 Nov 2014
Accepted: 01 May 2015

Published online: 01 Apr 2016 *

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