Introduction to Business Analytics

Introduction to Business Analytics; evolution from business intelligence to analytics; data-driven decision-making; types of analytics (descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive); role of analytics in modern organisations; data lifecycle in business; structured and unstructured data; introduction to tools and technologies used in analytics.

Concept of data in business context; data sources and data quality; data cleaning and preparation; introduction to databases; data warehousing concepts; business intelligence systems; dashboards and KPI tracking; role of Excel in business analytics; introduction to SQL and reporting tools.

Measures of central tendency and dispersion; data summarisation techniques; correlation and regression basics; trend and pattern analysis; data visualisation techniques; root cause analysis; interpretation of business data; introduction to statistical thinking for managers.

Introduction to forecasting techniques; time series basics; regression-based prediction; risk analysis; scenario and what-if analysis; optimisation concepts; decision models; basics of machine learning in business context; applications in marketing, finance, and operations.

Applications in marketing analytics (customer segmentation, pricing, sentiment analysis); financial analytics (credit scoring, risk analysis); case studies from Indian and global organisations; ethical issues in analytics. Practical Activities 1. Data summarisation using Excel 2. Creation of dashboards and KPI reports 3. Correlation and trend analysis on business datasets 4. Basic forecasting using simple statistical tools 5. Interpretation of business case studies using analytics