The Data Analytics Process

Data analytics is a process to turn data into insights and actionable recommendations. To illustrate this process, a business situation in a hypothetical company, Best Toy Company, is used for demonstration in this chapter. In this example, the company observes that some salespersons perform better than others in terms of sales volume. The HR manager is then tasked with understanding the key factors for improving the sales volume and implementing interventions to enhance overall sales volume. Using this hypothetical case, the whole data analytics process is discussed in detail. The HR manager performs the five-step data analytics process with quantitative statistical methods, including factor analysis and a reliability test to ensure the measures are valid and reliable, as well as correlation test and simple linear regression to find the significant factor for improving sales volume. The processes of these tests are demonstrated with SPSS and Excel. These robust statistical analyses are followed by Tesch’s qualitative coding process for further in-depth study to propose actionable recommendations. Apart from the statistical tests used in this hypothetical case, other statistical tests are also introduced. They will be illustrated in later chapters of this book.