Importance of Data Mining in Analyzing Your Business: Trend Shows An Increased Spending Irrespective of size, businesses are finding an edge over competition or a new niche by gaining greater insights from data. Mining customer data, reports on market analysis, sales data, and so on and making clear sense of the data is helping firms make major decisions and compete more effectively. Data analytics or data mining transforms raw data into useful information. An article in ComputerWeekly.com reports on a survey by Accenture and SAS which showed that in 2012, up to 72% of businesses in the US planned to spend more on analytics even when many other budgets were cut. Here’s a look of some of the ways in which the ability to predict trends from data has proved useful in various industries. Data Mining in the Automobile Industry The application of data mining in automotive sector can be well explained with the example of General Motors (GM). A 2012 Chevrolet Volt owner brought in his car for a warranty repair in Europe. The problem was a faulty valve which affected the working of the brakes. As a first attempt of error detection, GM analyzed the parts used in their cars, and collected its manufacturing records from the supplier. The analysis took one month and showed that only four cars in the US had a faulty valve! Data mining had saved the day. In fact, if this capability was not available, GM would have had two options to recall the model, inconveniencing thousands of owners or to let the defect slide which would have put the drivers’ lives at risk. Like GM, many automakers are using advanced track and trace software to spot defects more quickly. This is how the process works:
Each machine component is given a unique bar code or radio-frequency tag by the supplier At each assembly point, this component get scanned to collect data on how it was built If any problem emerges later, the automaker scans the component