Data and Analytics

Transforming data into insights and opportunities

Data is growing exponentially in both quantity and its importance in today’s organisations, especially with its ability to provide greater insight.

Can you trust your data? How can these data guide your business? Is your organisation ready to use data to drive strategic business decisions?

Data is quickly gaining importance in many business strategic decisions. Our Data and Analytics capabilities guide businesses in their data journey and harness the power of data and analytics. We work with clients to leverage on their data capabilities, understand risks and gain competitive advantage.

Use your data to help your business do better.

How Data & Analytics can bring value to you

Effective analytic starts with trusted data

You’re using your data to drive decisions, business strategy and digital innovation--there’s no room for error.

To achieve great insights, you need a strong data foundation. You need to know what data you have, where it is available, that it is maintained, up-to-date and can be trusted by stakeholders both internally and externally.

Solid data governance is the foundation to trusted data. For your data to be trustworthy, it needs to be well-organised, relevant, accurate and understandable.

Turn your data into a competitive advantage

So you have the right data architecture and reliable data quality. Now what do you do with it? That’s where predictive analytics comes in. It uses your data to give you the potential to act - not react. Use risk analytics to spot issues before it happens.

While it is helpful to understand past events and the factors that led to them, it is much more powerful to know what may happen in the future and how to influence it.

Gather customer insights to know how many people you need on the shop floor, weeks in advance. Predict and optimise deals through mergers and acquisition data. Filter the signal from the noise and look ahead with confidence.

How we can help

Discovery and descriptive analytics

So much data, yet so little time. How do you get the facts you need to run your business fast with minimal effort?

Data discovery does just this. It helps you quickly and easily discover outliers and detect patterns in your business. We’ll start by consolidating data from various sources across the organisation. Then we’ll help manipulate and visualise the data, and apply advanced analytics, so that you can spot trends or anomalies to make better-informed decisions.

Visualisation

Compelling visualisations bring data to life. Data visualisations can quickly help to identify trends, spot outliers and expose poor data quality.

Not only can we work with clients to help them make decisions, but we can make visualisation a business tool that everybody uses. Through maps, charts and simulations, they can trial ideas, test scenarios and see the impact of their decisions on the business.

Investigative analytics

Data can be crucial during crisis. For instance, when businesses are investigated for anti-corruption violations, they may need to either defend themselves in disputes or respond to regulators. By revisiting transactions from previous years, they would be able to respond accordingly.

We’re ready to help. Our forensics investigations teams use advanced analytics to identify, collect and analyse vast amounts of data. The technology and procedures we use are defensible in court. And, because we work with lawyers and regulators we can anticipate what they’re looking for.

We’ll help find the answers you need, in a way that’s easy to understand to give you the clarity and confidence that you need.

Predictive and behavioural modelling

If you’ve got sufficient and correct data, you can predict the likely outcome of any given situation.

This is made possible with the use of advanced analytics to identify the optimal locations for a client’s physical branches as well as the use of big data and predictive analytics to estimate when an aircraft is most likely to be grounded for maintenance. We can then use these insights to model how people’s behaviours will change as a reaction. We’ve helped retailers combine insight from their store footprints, logistics and customer behaviour to accurately plan staffing levels weeks in advance.

Simulation

Thanks to data and analytics, you can turn a theoretical situation into a dress rehearsal.

We use technology including virtual studios, gamification and other computer-generated simulations to help our clients answer the question: what if?

We can take advanced analysis and modelling, and apply it to real-world scenarios, so you can trial your response and be prepared when you actually experience this yourself. This includes the following scenarios; seeing the effects of shutting down a transport network, testing how prepared you are in reaction to a systems outage, simulating what would happen in the face of a major catastrophe.

Process mining and intelligence

More often than not, organisations understand their business processes from the flow-charts that state how the process should be performed. In reality, very few processes are ever completed following the exact steps created when the process was designed. What if key control steps are omitted? What if bottlenecks occur due to inefficient procedures? What if different teams are performing the same process in different ways? The results can impact customer experience, operational efficiencies and business risk.

We can use digital analysis of your business processes to mine the data that underpins them and help you understand what is really happening - both the process being followed and how individual events flow through the process over time. From there, we can help you improve your processes or even help you set up a control room to provide during monitoring capabilities.

Do what you do today even better

Every area in the business - from finance and operations to overall technological innovation - can be improved through the smart use of data and analytics.

The outcomes for the business are the most important thing – be it enabling a better customer experience, more efficient and leaner finance or operations or enabling the launch of a new service or product.

We help clients solve their most important business challenges with the power of data and analytics.

How we can help

Insight-led decisioning
Finance effectiveness
Operational efficiency
Risk and compliance effectiveness

Insight-led decisioning

You have more access to data about your customers and business than ever before. But how can it help you?

We can help you gain greater insight through listening to social media conversations, taking advantage of mobile devices as sensing platforms, and mining the details from CRM systems. By understanding how your customers behave and what they think of you, you can then make better decisions about how to serve customers including:

Optimising your pricing models
Planning effective social media monitoring
Improving product adoption in new and existing markets

Together, we’ll use analytics to gain meaningful insight from various sources of customer data.

Finance effectiveness

Finance functions are transforming. They are improving business results by investing in commercial insight, spending less time on transactional work and running at lower costs. Data and analytics is fuelling this change. Advances through the cloud, artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, if properly applied, can free up time for finance to create and deliver value across the organisation.

Operational efficiency

We work with clients to optimise their businesses - and make it sustainable, without hurting customer experience or the ability to innovate and grow.

We can help you:

Use data to find the potential to tighten up processes, reduce errors, and cut external spending
Use analytics to highlight patterns that show wasteful or inefficient processes
Make change stick, by delivering data and performance measures to the right people at the right time - and setting up incentives for people to act on it

Risk and compliance effectiveness

Risk and compliance teams tell us that meeting regulatory obligations and keeping up with regulatory changes continues to be a major challenge. They also say they lack confidence in the metrics they report and don’t have controlled access to key data to help manage risks.

Executives tell us that their systems can’t process large volumes of data from different sources. This can mean that too much data overwhelms internal controls - which creates operational, financial and reputational risks.

With pressure on regulators and management to identify new risks earlier and take more effective action, our teams can help:

Improve data management and create detailed audit trails, more efficient case management and more accurate reporting
Identify operational efficiencies, cut manual testing and find potential cost-savings
Create dashboards, monitor operations and provide real-time insight
Reduce the risks of monetary penalties and sanctions - and protect against reputational damage

Reimagine the possible

If data is the new oil, business innovation comes when you know where and how to strike it.

Data and analytics is all about making new trends, developments, inventive approaches and technology innovation work for you. With advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, today’s machines can read, have conversations and analyse previously unmanageable amounts of data.

While data and analytics hold much promise in this fast paced environment, it needs to be approached in the right way. One small oversight – coding our own bias into a decision-making algorithm, mishandling of customer data or collecting too much personal data – can go viral and quickly damage a brand.

Together, we’ll explore emerging technologies, test innovative ideas and uncover ways to rethink the way you do business in an ethical and responsible way.

How we can help

Proof of concepts
Data privacy by design
Commercialisation

Proof of concepts

We’re working with clients in various industries to help them explore the possibility their business can achieve. Through innovation workshops, we help them trial ideas and rapidly create a ‘proof of concept’ for their business.

We work across the latest technologies and use advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence and automation. Through innovation sprints and trials, we can help you test the potential to change the way you do business.

Data privacy by design

Data privacy often occupies the headlines -- whether it is the latest breach, concern over how a business’s latest digital offering impacts an individual’s digital profile or the ethics of collecting more and more information on customers and users. Privacy has never been as topical as it is today. The impact of getting data privacy wrong can be catastrophic and severely undermine public trust in a business, product or digital offering. A raft of new legislation is being adopted across the globe – including the EU’s GDPR – and many other countries are now following suit.

Privacy should be at the forefront of design for any new business capability or product offering. We can help you establish ethics and privacy at the heart of your business or from the early stages of product development. We can support you in being not just privacy compliant from day one but also consider the wider public perception of your brand and products in relation to how you use personal data and more advanced technology.

Commercialisation

If you’ve got great innovation and a strong analytics foundation in your business, how can you reap the rewards?

We work with clients to commercialise and monetise their data and analytics capabilities. We help them understand the value of the data and capabilities they have, find new revenue streams, and turn them into reality. Our teams can share insight and expertise to make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to turn potential into tangible business success.

How we can help

Data landscape
Data strategy
Data governance
Data quality
Data architecture

Data landscape

Data is everywhere. A wider variety of data (both structured and unstructured) is being utilised by businesses like never before and the volume of data generated, stored and consumed is rapidly growing.

You’ll want to use a variety of data to help you make smarter commercial decisions. But do you know what data you have? And where it’s stored? Can you be sure of its provenance? Was it accurate in the first place? As new systems come online, you’ll also need to consider whether your data is being transferred accurately. Can you adequately protect your data?

We can help you understand, gather, review and model the data you need to create sustainable business value while utilising the most appropriate technology. Our data specialists continue the PwC heritage of audit and assurance, which has taught us how to build strong businesses on trusted data.

Data strategy

Unlocking the power of data and analytics starts with a clear understanding of what strategic goals you want to achieve and how to build a successful intelligent organisation.

This is good business strategy. So you will need a partner who understands business combined with the experience in how data and analytics can be central in achieving the business’s strategic goals.

We’ll bring our experience in assurance, attention to detail and big picture commercial insight to help you define how your organisation can take advantage of its data and available technology to become more data-driven, enabling a wider digital agenda.

Data governance

Data governance builds trust and confidence. Managing the risk in data is essential, but great data governance goes far beyond this. And it’s very rarely built on a one-size-fits-all model.

Effective data governance recognises the context in which you operate, and acknowledges that data priorities can change to reflect strategic and operational ones. It fits into your existing structure and processes, so that it’s easier to adopt the right behaviours around data management. It recognises that not all data is equal - and that data management should be prioritised, so that the most important data gets the attention it deserves.

We’ll help you make great governance ‘the way things are done’, so you can build confidence throughout your organisation and with relevant external stakeholders.

Data quality

Many data analytics and reporting projects fail as organisations find that the benefits realised are severely diminished due to poor data quality. Fixing data quality issues can be time-consuming and costly, so understanding what data is critical to your business and analytics needs is an important first step to focus efforts and get maximum returns.

Our experience in audit and assurance has taught us how to build strong businesses on trusted data. We can help you identify your critical data and effectively manage data quality at an appropriate level for your business. For major data quality issues, we can support you in understanding the problem and developing fixes to the root cause, data remediation and ongoing controls to maintain a consistently high level of data quality.

Data architecture

Businesses today are looking for next-generation architectures to deal with diverse data assets, speed up data processing and analytics, and drive innovation and lower costs.

We’ll help you consider and set up the best ways to store and govern your data, share it across the enterprise with multiple systems, and help your people and systems consume and process it.

Highlights from PwC's Data.AI 2024

PwC Malaysia hosted the ‘Data.AI 2024’ event on 26 February. Supported by AWS and EDM Council, it brought together industry leaders and subject matter experts to share insights on current data trends.