Last time, we have looked at how Data is playing a crucial role for the top corporates in solving their business issues and challenges. In this blog, we will look at why companies are spending their time and resources on analyzing the data and what is there, which opens a door for young students and professionals to take up Data Science as a career option.

Let us start with one question – What is the main motive of any corporate? Possible answers can be like serving humanity with the required products and services, providing a boost to the global economy, and so on. While these can be secondary motives, the primary being increasing the revenue and profit of the firm.

Let us now investigate this in detail by taking an example – Suppose there is a biscuit manufacturing company in Odisha. They are selling biscuits ranging from INR 5 to INR 40. They have yearly revenue of INR 10 crores. The company got to find that their operating expenses are INR 9.2 Crores. Operating expenses include all the expenses that are involved from the procurement of raw materials, machinery maintenance, wages, distribution, transportation, warehousing, etc., which means some costs anyhow can’t be removed. So, in the end, what the company left with is INR 80 lacs, which is their net profit. Now the management decides to increase their net profit. How can they do the same? There are 2 options – either by increasing the price of their products or by decreasing the operating expense. The first one will be difficult as in a highly fragmented market like biscuit, increasing the price of the product won’t help the brand to compete with competitors. They are only left with decreasing their operating expenses. This is where Data Science comes into play. But How?

With the help of data science tools and techniques, data analysts and data scientists can prepare cost optimization models either by looking into reducing transportation cost by taking some other route or procuring from some other location or reducing the machinery and electricity cost by looking into the time when the machine is idle. This all is possible using Data Science tools. This is an example where we have considered a small organization with 10 crores. Consider a big firm like Reliance, Tata, Google, Microsoft, how much will they save if they use their data and use the same to optimize the cost.

For traders, investors predicting stock returns and knowing about market efficiency play a crucial role. This predicting of future stock movement is a challenging task. As I have said in my previous blog, Data Science is the perfect mix of various tools and algorithms to find hidden patterns from the raw data, using along forecasting methods researchers get many insights about the financial health of any company. Predicting future values based on the past and present data is a real tough task that needs skilled personnel.

Not only cost optimization and stocks predictions but Data is also used to predict the future like for the financial year 2021-22, a steel manufacturing company needs to prepare how much steel, a medicine company needs to prepare approximately how many dosages of medicine, all depends on historical data for that sector and future prediction.

Most of the firms follow the basics of marketing i.e. STP – Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning. This means, for any product or service that they develop, they need to segment the population (divide the population), target the right group of peoples for their product, and position (communication or advertise) the product accordingly. Segmentation of population is done through Cluster Analysis, which is again carried on with the help of Data Science tools like R, Python. Not only this, even for positioning, Data Science techniques are used.

We can say Data is the future, Data is our eye for tomorrow. With many options available these days to carry as a career option, I can say Data Science is the biggest boom, a right career to take up and this will shape the right direction for the individual as well as society.