Being a tastemaker is all about knowing what people want before they want it, then using that information to predict trends. But for a long time, there was no good way to quickly predict what move to make.

Fashion house Adrianna Papell is a New York City-based company that grew from a simple dressmaking outfit specializing in silk garments to a fashion house devoted to outfitting women for all occasions.  As the company grew, it had a hard time keeping up with fickle consumer sensibilities, product tracking, and sales figures through time and geographic location.

Columbus Foods is a California-based company that makes tasty deli meats which they sell across the US. Making good meat is resource-sensitive, since some meats take nearly 90 days to mature. Making it ahead of time to meet customer demand can be tricky; too little means missing out on sales, too much increases the chance of the food going bad.

In order to better serve their customers, both companies turned to business analytics to get a grasp on all that data in order to get a clearer picture of what their customers wanted ahead of time. In both cases, it was analytics that ultimately helped them to increase sales.

For a better grasp on all this, check out the infographic illustration by Tim Van den Broeck below:



So if you're keen on signing up analytics for your own business, you can check out IBM’s wide array of business analytics products to start making those connections.