Supportsoft Glossary

Prescriptive Analytics for Data-Driven Action Planning

  In contrast to descriptive and predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics provides recommendations for specific actions based on the insights derived from the underlying data. Predictive analytics gives organisations the ability to predict what might happen in the future, whereas prescriptive analytics gives organisations direction by indicating which actions they need to take in order to produce the most favourable results.

In business contexts, prescriptive analytics combines historical, real-time and continuously updated data, machine learning models and business rules in order to evaluate multiple scenarios. Businesses can utilise prescriptive analytics to improve their decision-making process in a variety of areas, including supply chain management, pricing strategy, resource allocation and operational planning.

For IT and ITES providers, prescriptive analytics helps enable the intelligent automation of business processes and the ability to be proactive in managing the services they deliver. For example, prescriptive analytics can identify the recommended corrective actions to take in the event of a systems failure, recommend an approach to redistributing workload or suggest the best way to respond to an incident based upon known objectives and constraints.

Prescriptive analytics models continually adjust and adapt to new data entering the business, which allows organisations to quickly respond to changes in their operating environment. However, in order for prescriptive analytics to be effective in providing meaningful results to an organisation, the organisation needs to have accurate and complete data, clearly articulated objectives, and alignment of analytics with the organisation’s business processes.