Data has become a key contributor for driving any activities of our day-to-day life. For example, your name, age, height, weight, etc. are some data related to you. A picture, image, reaction, mouse hover, etc. can also be considered as data. Think about it, these are the information or data emulating yourself through your digital activities occurring everyday here and there. Even most of our everyday activities like listening to music, working out and scrolling social media also harness your actions to request more entertainment options for you. For example, platforms like YouTube, Spotify collects user listening information to create customized playlists, while Instagram tracks your engagements to streamline their sponsored ads and suggested accounts that match your interests.

We can say in simple words, data can be facts related to any object in consideration. You may now think, everyone is talking about data, but what is the big deal with this data and how does all this work?Data can give actionable insights about your business that you didn’t even know existed. Even the smallest businesses generate data; through social media presence, credit card use and web traffic. Data can be an invaluable asset.

Data collection and analysis can allow one to -

• Generate new business insights

• Improve operational processes

• Gather customer’s intelligence

• Measure return on investment

Now the question is how does one use it to enhance their business?

Data is the fuel of every business and it has become a key input for driving growth and enabling businesses to differentiate themselves.

Data can be used in any field of business

It helps businesses in decision making. While there are many influences in making a decision, data can help a business to make smarter decisions for better growth, increased sales or revolutionizing user experience.

It helps to solve problems

Tracking and reviewing data from business processes helps to root out the performance breakdowns so you can better understand each part of the process and know which steps need to be fixed and which are performing well.

Understanding and measuring performance

Data makes you understand and improves the operational performances so that you can reduce the waste of money and time. For instance, without knowing about your resources or without researching your targeting market, making advertising decisions can be one of the greatest wastes of resources in a company. Data analysis shows how different marketing channels are performing, which ones offer the greatest ROI and educates us to focus on those. This would allow you to allocate a budget to generate more value without having to increase the advertising spend.

And most importantly it helps you to understand your valuable customer. Without data, you would probably never know who your customers are, whether consumers like your products, if your marketing efforts are effective or even how much money you are making. To find the answer to these questions, understanding your customers through market data is the ultimate key.

In a nutshell, we can say analyzing data introduces a whole world of opportunities and insights for the businesses to accelerate their performances.

Representations of Data

When it comes to business, the way you represent the right information to the right audience in the right form is an effective strategy to stand out from the competition. Thus, businesses have to work hard to grab their target market’s attention because so many businesses are there to compete. For this, marketers need to strategize well.

In this digital age, study of data demands higher importance when dealing with a huge amount of information. Human brains are not good at studying such a bulk amount of data. Our brains process visual information better than reading entire blocks of listed or text-based information. Data visualization speeds up decision-making and allows users to gain a deeper understanding of what is happening behind the scenes. (Calzon, 2021)People tend to remember charts with stronger visual images than their plain counterparts. An experiment by the department of computer science at the University of Saskatchewan revealed that people tend to remember the details of a graphical visual after a gap of longer than 12 days than the details of plain listed representation of a data.

Data visualization is the graphical representation of information. Through the use of visual elements like charts, graphs, and maps, data visualization tools provide a scrutinized view to understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data. Oftentimes, it also helps figure out the missing links such as trends or patterns. (Bowen, 1992) Our eyes are drawn to colors and patterns. We can easily and quickly identify green from red, square from circle. These graphical elements help us to understand the business situation. For example, a utility company can use a column chart to help its users see how much energy they've consumed during the last billing cycle. On the other hand, a bakery can identify how many breads it sells when compared to its other products such as cheesecakes and apple pies, through the use of a pie chart.

Wherefore in today’s high-tech world, data visualization tools and technologies are essential to analyze massive amounts of information to make data-driven decisions and create an interface which users can easily understand. So, if we make some specific points, we can say data visualization helps to -

• Summarize large amounts of text data which you can understand at a glance

• Find insights in qualitative data

• Analyze and visualize hidden trends and patterns

Considering the restaurant business scenario in Bangladesh, if we consider one specificity for example Dhaka, there are numerous restaurants situated here and there. Entrepreneurs who are involved with food and restaurant businesses are an important part of the informal sector business in Bangladesh. As the restaurant business in Bangladesh has no institutional recognition. One of the major problems faced by the entrepreneurs to accelerate business revenue is due to the lack of proper data analysis.When a restaurant owner thinks of updating their sales pattern, offer discounts on the menu or identify the better performing items, they struggle with situations like -

• Hiring an individual to analyze listed information to find out sales trends

• Increase fixed costs through hiring employees for sales analysis

• Waste time in hours of discussion to make a simple business decision

Many people around you may never truly understand how much data analysis is important and it takes to power a successful restaurant. We understand how hard it is. Due to this, no company provides a visually accurate and data driven system to improve their restaurant business, which gave birth to FoodQo. Not only is data analysis the major driving factor of FoodQo, but the operational acceleration that will drive the business forward is also what FoodQo’s usage has the capability to ensure. Read more in the next article about FoodQo and the immense possibilities through FoodQo usage.