Azure Synapse Analytics Benefits Explained [+Use Cases for 4 Sectors]

By: Published: March 30, 2023

AZURE SYNAPSE ANALYTICS BENEFITS FI

We all are in the post-pandemic era now. Everything in the business sector has changed, including how they operate and employ tools and methods. The field of data analytics has also been touched by the winds of change. The need for up-to-date analytics has increased due to the increased urgency for business-leading data. 

Being able to gather and distribute these insights in the most economical way is equally essential. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is useful in this situation. It enables organizations with siloed infrastructure to handle and analyze their data from a single location and breaks down all possible silos.

In this blog, let me walk you through the benefits and use cases of Azure Synapse Analytics. Let’s jump right into it!

A Quick Glance at the Benefits

Here are some of the important benefits:

  • Improve analytics & reporting speed: Reduces time spent manually gathering, compiling, and creating reports. With instantaneous scalability and adaptability, workload fluctuations don’t result in downtime. It also improves more rapid DWH implementation.
  • More effective BI and data visualization: The reporting and analysis of key indicators are engaging and simple to use thanks to the seamless and native connection with Power BI. With fewer data silos and greater visibility, sharing with the right stakeholders across business streams becomes simpler.
  • Increases IT productivity: Enables staff to automate infrastructure provisioning and administrative tasks (includes DWH setup, patch management, and maintenance).
  • Limitless scaling: Being a cloud-based service, Azure Synapse Analytics can view, organize, and query (relational & non-relational data) faster than traditional on-premises tools. In other words, you can efficiently manage thousands of concurrent users and systems. And, when compared with Google’s BigQuery, Synapse could run the same query in less time over a petabyte of data.

That’s about it. So, how do the benefits cater to different industries?

Azure Synapse Analytics Benefits Based on Industry

Let’s take the four main industries that use data analytics for their business requirements. 

Manufacturing Sector

Industry 4.0 combines operations with analytics and allows quick access to precise data. Other benefits include:

  • Avert unplanned downtime: Accurate equipment failure prediction to lower maintenance costs, prevent costly downtime, and increase operational efficiency. Industry 4.0 combines operations with analytics and allows quick access to precise data.
  • Increase supply chain visibility: To obtain 360-degree visibility of company operations, integrate various data sources throughout the supply chain.

Use Cases in Manufacturing

Consider a situation where your business is having trouble integrating point-of-sale (POS) data sets from your channel business partners. There won’t be a single location where you can go for your analytic requirements if the data is from many sources.

In this case, an Azure-based solution can be useful. Because the POS data arrives from various source systems. The ETL process time from your company’s previous system can be shortened by using such a solution. It could also speed up the processing of reports. 

Azure Synapse Analytics can be the ideal solution for the various personas in the organization because it is a comprehensive solution for combining data and reporting.

Retail Sector

In the retail sector, it primarily combines siloed data and increases customer satisfaction.

  • Better customer satisfaction: Create a robust supply chain by centralizing data from connected sales channels and generating insights in real-time to better serve customers.
  • Implement omnichannel optimization: Make sure that customers have a seamless purchasing experience by enabling them to switch between various sales channels, platforms, and gadgets.
  • Personalize your recommendations: Ingest, clean, process, and examine customer data to derive useful insights for providing relevant and personalized offers. Consolidate various client data sources and improve them in real-time to create customer journeys and experiences.
  • Build a future-ready supply chain: To inform your marketing efforts and merchandising choices, identify key trends from your customers’ past purchases, browsing habits, and purchasing preferences. 
  • Improve vendor collaboration: Eliminate silos and enhance vendor collaboration with end-to-end analytics by sharing inventory data easily.

Use Cases in the Retail Sector

Suppose you are a supplier in data and analytics. You gather and analyze point-of-sale data from many retail locations and receipts from customers to measure and forecast success across product channels.

On-premises virtual computers and the hardware they require can be replaced with a cutting-edge data warehouse like Azure Synapse. As a result, costs will be reduced. Additionally, you can lower the overall number of systems needed to handle your data by optimizing the data architecture, schemas, and application design.

Healthcare Sector

  • Care operations can be automated: Azure Synapse helps you to provide patients with easy access to the health data they require to get the right treatment. Consolidating data from various health IT systems will speed up routine tasks and free up your care workers to focus on raising the standard of patient care.
  • Clinical analytics in use: Linking symptoms to diseases through analysis of patient health data will help prescribe the best course of action. You will be able to utilize clinical factors to find patterns and identify predictors. This will in turn help with precise readmission and treatment forecasting.

Use Cases in Healthcare

Let’s take the following scenario. Suppose, the analytics team’s ability to support the business becomes increasingly time-consuming and inefficient. This could be due to the growing demand from the company for more reports with difficult insights. Your team will likely encounter a number of difficulties when attempting to connect data from multiple systems. This includes the need to duplicate procedures, deal with duplicate and inconsistent data, and continuously work on system-to-system data reconciliation. 

You will need to develop an enterprise-grade standardized repository for strong analytics and insights by using Azure Synapse.

Financial Services

In the financial services sector, Azure Synapse maintains your competitive edge and creates individualized client journeys. It also ensures compliance and puts good governance practices into place. Other Azure Synapse Analytics benefits include: 

  • Customize products & services: Integrates diverse data sources for an in-depth understanding of customer profiles and demographics. This can be used to create relevant services and provide outstanding experiences.
  • Identify potential frauds: Enhances client trust by monitoring transactional activity across accounts and devices round-the-clock. You can use that to notify consumers right away in the event of a potential threat and identify fraud at the very first stage. 
  • Manage and reduce risk:  Provides consolidated and flexible strategy for gathering and analyzing enterprise data. Implement affordable solutions that permit a prompt and sensible reaction to risks.

Use cases in Financial Services

Azure Synapse can be used to streamline monthly loan reporting procedures and lower associated costs. Ingest data from various sources and manipulate it to get the loan loss. Then manipulate data to obtain the loan loss. Finally, you can generate reports to present the data in an insightful and user-friendly manner.

Benefits of Azure Synapse Analytics for Different Industries
Azure Synapse Analytics Benefits for Different Industries

I hope you got a clear understanding of the benefits and use cases. To summarize:

Conclusion

Businesses can centrally control their data lakes and warehouses with Azure Synapse Analytics. Azure Synapse Analytics provides a unified analytics solution for Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and data preparation, management, and warehousing tasks.

The main benefits include improving analytics & reporting speed, and effective BI and data visualization. I hope the use cases and benefits for different sectors mentioned in the blog help you understand if it’s suitable for your requirements. 

In case you want to integrate data into your desired Database/destination, then Hevo Data is the right choice for you! It will help simplify the ETL and management process of both the data sources and the data destinations. 

Visit our Website to Explore Hevo

Offering 150+ plug-and-play integrations and saving countless hours of manual data cleaning & standardizing, Hevo Data also offers in-built pre-load data transformations that get it done in minutes via a simple drag-and-drop interface or your custom python scripts. 

Want to take Hevo Data for a ride? SIGN UP for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. Check out the pricing details to understand which plan fulfills all your business needs.

mm
Content Marketing Specialist, Hevo Data

Anaswara is an engineer-turned writer having experience writing about ML, AI, and Data Science. She is also an active Guest Author in various communities of Analytics and Data Science professionals including Analytics Vidhya.

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