Supply Chain and Logistics Technology
Importance of Data & Statistics in Business
Data and statistics play a vital role in all businesses and entrepreneurship ventures by providing insight into complex and uncertain situations. Data can be divided into two broad categories, internal (primary) and external (secondary). Internal data is generated from within the business, for example, sales reports, inventory analysis, and expenditures. intuitively, external data is collected and processed outside the company. This page will focus primarily on external data. External data is vital to understanding your customers, competition, and industry. External data and statistics can be used to:
- Make predictions about the future – effective forecasting allows business to develop data-driven strategies that will ultimately help them anticipate changes within the market
- Manage risk – data can provide key insight into local, regional, and global economic environments that can prevent companies from making untimely capital investments.
- Assess Markets – It is vital to gauge consumers' needs and capacity for a product or service (verify market need). This data helps businesses assess if there is enough demand, identify the customers, identify the competitors, and test the market viability.
In a perfect world, data and statistics should help you make decisions quicker, solve problems faster. However, there are limitations to find, use, and analyze data and statistics. Some data sets may have a small sample size or outdated data, both can negatively impact the accuracy and integrity of resulting projections or decisions.
Data and Statistics Databases
The following databases are a good place to start your quest to finding data and statistics for your research:
- Sage Data This link opens in a new windowSage Data provides access to statistical data produced by U.S. Federal agencies, States, private organizations, and major intergovernmental organizations. There are over 185+ billion data points available in charts, maps, views, rankings, time series and tables in the Sage Data repository. Sage Data offers powerful capabilities to compare & contrast multiple data series, perform statistical calculations on the data, and customize output views
- Statista This link opens in a new windowStatista.com consolidates statistical data on over 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources and makes it available on four platforms: German, English, French and Spanish.
- PolicyMap This link opens in a new windowPolicyMap is a fully web-based online data and mapping application that gives you access to over 15,000 indicators related to demographics, housing, crime, mortgages, health, jobs and more. Data is available at all common geographies (address, block group, census tract, zip code, county, city, state, MSA) as well as unique geographies like school districts and political boundaries. Data comes from both public and proprietary sources.
- Wharton Research Data Services This link opens in a new windowWharton Research Data Services (WRDS) is a research platform and business intelligence tool that provides access to CompuStat, S&P Capital IQ, CRSP, NYSE, Thomson Reuters, Bureau van Dijk, Global Insight, OptionMetrics and other important business research databases, with data reaching across multiple disciplines including accounting, banking, economics, finance, ESG, and statistics.
