Following global trend, businesses in Indonesia have started tapping into data collection to bolster the precision of their business operations, especially for product/service monitoring and evaluation purposes, on top of traditional market research and business analysis activities. Statistics from OmniSci, for instance, predicted that data centers would grow by 11 percent across Indonesia over the next five years.

At the same time, OmniSci also said Indonesian businesses still need to step up their efforts to gain rich insights from the abundant data that they possess. Companies can start tapping into their historical data to improve the quality of their products and services on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. 

Why historical data?

Historical data refers to a collection of data involving past events and circumstances from various documents (such as, among others, social media postings, email correspondence, daily records and inventories). Those data are usually analyzed and synthesized to help businesses make decisions regarding daily operations, solve problems and predict future trends. It can help businesses tweak their daily operations and make adjustments based on real-time evaluation and monitoring activities to boost customer satisfaction and meet their needs. Historical data also supplements the more long-term market research and business analysis activities aiming to look at the bigger picture, while also cutting back on inefficient analysis costs and processes. The value of data, however, diminishes over time, so historical data are divided into two types: the frequently accessed hot data, which are important for quick decisions and thereby stored on fast and expensive hardware like Flash, as well as the older and less frequently used cold data, which are generally stored on cheaper storage platforms.

Examples of historical data application

Application of historical data can help you constantly adjust your business operations to real-time circumstance changes among consumers which happen on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. If you are a public transport operator for instance, you can use the data on a daily basis to identify peak hours during the day to provide more fleets and determine on which hours you need to operate only a few fleets. If you operate a restaurant, you can bolster the efficiency of your social marketing efforts by analyzing on which days of the week people are in the mood for comfort food and at which hours they find themselves more in the mood for some pastries and coffee so you can actually offer the right people specific menu items at a specific time. This way, not only will you be able to stay relevant to your customers’ needs, you can make quicker decisions about the right business activities, targeting the right people at the right time. At the same time, historical data can also prevent likelihoods of product or service defects in the future by providing insight into past risk factors for such defects. This way, historical data also helps you make better forecasts.

How big data solutions can help

Of course, as OmniSci has stated: having data alone is not alone. To make use of historical data in your decision making, according to Emtec Digital, you have to take these steps: map out a strategy, identify specific areas to concentrate, build questionnaires to achieve required goals, identify the right set of data as well as collecting and analyzing datasets via technologies. Using the right software really matters to accomplish these functions.