Wednesday, 31 July 2013

Get The Best Data Entry Services For Your Business

When you get to work on something that you are passionate about, it is understood that the results will be very good and you will enjoy your work. However, on the flip side, sometimes we are also entrusted with a work we are not very comfortable with and being professionals we must do the work perfectly. One such work is the work of data entry services; this is one work that no one likes to do, but it is a very crucial work for any business. Data entry is a boring and mundane work but every organization knows that this is a very important aspect of their company, so they ensure that they have efficient professionals handling this work for them. We know it may get difficult and expensive for companies to hire people in-house to do the work, so they have the option of outsourcing the data entry services.

Data entry services outsourcing, is one business process which an increasingly large number of companies are adopting, just because the whole thing is working out favorably for them. Outsourcing means to get the services of a third party to do the work for you from outside your company. First, by outsourcing the work, companies can save huge amount of money, which can be counted as profits. The work is generally outsourced to developing countries, where you can find large number of trained professionals doing the work at a very less cost. In fact, the cost will come to less than half the amount that you have to spend, if you hire professionals in-house to do the work for you. Second, you can get the services of highly skilled professionals to do the work, which will be impossible for you to do, if you hire professionals in-house for the same purpose.

Data entry services can be of various types, it can be to maintain the personal details of the employees in an organization, maintain the financial details or any other details that may be required. For companies that are dealing with loans, they have to maintain huge database of information and for this, the data entry service professionals need to be very highly skilled. The data can also be numeric, alphabetic, alphanumeric or others, as required. If you are getting outsourcing services, you must make sure that you hire the right professionals to do the work perfectly for you. Today, more and more companies are getting their data entry services outsourced from third parties as this is turning out to be very beneficial for their business.

Now there are several companies that offer data entry services to clients, you just have to be careful about this and select the best company to do your work. You can always do a reference check and some background study on the reputation they have in this field, before you hire their services. You must remember that data entry is a very crucial aspect of your business, so you

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Get-The-Best-Data-Entry-Services-For-Your-Business&id=817110

Monday, 29 July 2013

Digging Up Dollars With Data Mining - An Executive's Guide

Traditionally, organizations use data tactically - to manage operations. For a competitive edge, strong organizations use data strategically - to expand the business, to improve profitability, to reduce costs, and to market more effectively. Data mining (DM) creates information assets that an organization can leverage to achieve these strategic objectives.

In this article, we address some of the key questions executives have about data mining. These include:

    What is data mining?
    What can it do for my organization?
    How can my organization get started?

Business Definition of Data Mining

Data mining is a new component in an enterprise's decision support system (DSS) architecture. It complements and interlocks with other DSS capabilities such as query and reporting, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), data visualization, and traditional statistical analysis. These other DSS technologies are generally retrospective. They provide reports, tables, and graphs of what happened in the past. A user who knows what she's looking for can answer specific questions like: "How many new accounts were opened in the Midwest region last quarter," "Which stores had the largest change in revenues compared to the same month last year," or "Did we meet our goal of a ten-percent increase in holiday sales?"

We define data mining as "the data-driven discovery and modeling of hidden patterns in large volumes of data." Data mining differs from the retrospective technologies above because it produces models - models that capture and represent the hidden patterns in the data. With it, a user can discover patterns and build models automatically, without knowing exactly what she's looking for. The models are both descriptive and prospective. They address why things happened and what is likely to happen next. A user can pose "what-if" questions to a data-mining model that can not be queried directly from the database or warehouse. Examples include: "What is the expected lifetime value of every customer account," "Which customers are likely to open a money market account," or "Will this customer cancel our service if we introduce fees?"

The information technologies associated with DM are neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, and rule induction. It is outside the scope of this article to elaborate on all of these technologies. Instead, we will focus on business needs and how data mining solutions for these needs can translate into dollars.

Mapping Business Needs to Solutions and Profits

What can data mining do for your organization? In the introduction, we described several strategic opportunities for an organization to use data for advantage: business expansion, profitability, cost reduction, and sales and marketing. Let's consider these opportunities very concretely through several examples where companies successfully applied DM.

Expanding your business: Keystone Financial of Williamsport, PA, wanted to expand their customer base and attract new accounts through a LoanCheck offer. To initiate a loan, a recipient just had to go to a Keystone branch and cash the LoanCheck. Keystone introduced the $5000 LoanCheck by mailing a promotion to existing customers.

The Keystone database tracks about 300 characteristics for each customer. These characteristics include whether the person had already opened loans in the past two years, the number of active credit cards, the balance levels on those cards, and finally whether or not they responded to the $5000 LoanCheck offer. Keystone used data mining to sift through the 300 customer characteristics, find the most significant ones, and build a model of response to the LoanCheck offer. Then, they applied the model to a list of 400,000 prospects obtained from a credit bureau.

By selectively mailing to the best-rated prospects determined by the DM model, Keystone generated $1.6M in additional net income from 12,000 new customers.

Reducing costs: Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield is New York State's largest health insurer. To compete with other healthcare companies, Empire must provide quality service and minimize costs. Attacking costs in the form of fraud and abuse is a cornerstone of Empire's strategy, and it requires considerable investigative skill as well as sophisticated information technology.

The latter includes a data mining application that profiles each physician in the Empire network based on patient claim records in their database. From the profile, the application detects subtle deviations in physician behavior relative to her/his peer group. These deviations are reported to fraud investigators as a "suspicion index." A physician who performs a high number of procedures per visit, charges 40% more per patient, or sees many patients on the weekend would be flagged immediately from the suspicion index score.

What has this DM effort returned to Empire? In the first three years, they realized fraud-and-abuse savings of $29M, $36M, and $39M respectively.

Improving sales effectiveness and profitability: Pharmaceutical sales representatives have a broad assortment of tools for promoting products to physicians. These tools include clinical literature, product samples, dinner meetings, teleconferences, golf outings, and more. Knowing which promotions will be most effective with which doctors is extremely valuable since wrong decisions can cost the company hundreds of dollars for the sales call and even more in lost revenue.

The reps for a large pharmaceutical company collectively make tens of thousands of sales calls. One drug maker linked six months of promotional activity with corresponding sales figures in a database, which they then used to build a predictive model for each doctor. The data-mining models revealed, for instance, that among six different promotional alternatives, only two had a significant impact on the prescribing behavior of physicians. Using all the knowledge embedded in the data-mining models, the promotional mix for each doctor was customized to maximize ROI.

Although this new program was rolled out just recently, early responses indicate that the drug maker will exceed the $1.4M sales increase originally projected. Given that this increase is generated with no new promotional spending, profits are expected to increase by a similar amount.

Looking back at this set of examples, we must ask, "Why was data mining necessary?" For Keystone, response to the loan offer did not exist in the new credit bureau database of 400,000 potential customers. The model predicted the response given the other available customer characteristics. For Empire, the suspicion index quantified the differences between physician practices and peer (model) behavior. Appropriate physician behavior was a multi-variable aggregate produced by data mining - once again, not available in the database. For the drug maker, the promotion and sales databases contained the historical record of activity. An automated data mining method was necessary to model each doctor and determine the best combination of promotions to increase future sales.

Getting Started

In each case presented above, data mining yielded significant benefits to the business. Some were top-line results that increased revenues or expanded the customer base. Others were bottom-line improvements resulting from cost-savings and enhanced productivity. The natural next question is, "How can my organization get started and begin to realize the competitive advantages of DM?"

In our experience, pilot projects are the most successful vehicles for introducing data mining. A pilot project is a short, well-planned effort to bring DM into an organization. Good pilot projects focus on one very specific business need, and they involve business users up front and throughout the project. The duration of a typical pilot project is one to three months, and it generally requires 4 to 10 people part-time.

The role of the executive in such pilot projects is two-pronged. At the outset, the executive participates in setting the strategic goals and objectives for the project. During the project and prior to roll out, the executive takes part by supervising the measurement and evaluation of results. Lack of executive sponsorship and failure to involve business users are two primary reasons DM initiatives stall or fall short.

In reading this article, perhaps you've developed a vision and want to proceed - to address a pressing business problem by sponsoring a data mining pilot project. Twisting the old adage, we say "just because you should doesn't mean you can." Be aware that a capability assessment needs to be an integral component of a DM pilot project. The assessment takes a critical look at data and data access, personnel and their skills, equipment, and software. Organizations typically underestimate the impact of data mining (and information technology in general) on their people, their processes, and their corporate culture. The pilot project provides a relatively high-reward, low-cost, and low-risk opportunity to quantify the potential impact of DM.

Another stumbling block for an organization is deciding to defer any data mining activity until a data warehouse is built. Our experience indicates that, oftentimes, DM could and should come first. The purpose of the data warehouse is to provide users the opportunity to study customer and market behavior both retrospectively and prospectively. A data mining pilot project can provide important insight into the fields and aggregates that need to be designed into the warehouse to make it really valuable. Further, the cost savings or revenue generation provided by DM can provide bootstrap funding for a data warehouse or related initiatives.

Recapping, in this article we addressed the key questions executives have about data mining - what it is, what the benefits are, and how to get started. Armed with this knowledge, begin with a pilot project. From there, you can continue building the data mining capability in your organization; to expand your business, improve profitability, reduce costs, and market your products more effectively.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Digging-Up-Dollars-With-Data-Mining---An-Executives-Guide&id=6052872

Sunday, 28 July 2013

Outsourcing Data Entry Services

Data entry services are among the many benefits that the IT sector is providing to corporate firms worldwide. These services often range from simple text data entry to alpha numerical entries requiring calculations such as bill processing for clients. To meet the demands for high quality and accurate textual and numerical data entry jobs, most outsourcing firms are employing the services of talented operators who are skilled in fast keyboard operations and word processing software.

Often business firms find it difficult to manage their huge data manipulation jobs and are compelled to outsource such jobs. In order to meet the deadlines in document entry jobs, the Business Processing Outsourcing (BPOs) units that are engaged in providing data entry services are offering their services in a fast, competitive and efficient manner. Quality in work is given top priority by these BPOs and to ensure this, they utilize the services of proofreaders who always double check the processed data for errors.

Data entry service providers also provide customized document entry services, suiting the requirements of client companies. Common data entry jobs being offered by BPOs include:

o Online data entry
o Offline data entry
o Data capture and conversion
o Document processing and management
o Medical document entry
o Insurance claim processing
o Census document entry

To cater to the increasing need of business firms to process their critical data as early as possible, most document processing firms have their own backup centers with sufficient employees. Most BPO firms operate round the clock to ensure that no work remains in pending state. The 24 hr operations of these firms also ensure that the daily requirements in critical data processing such as insurance claim processing are done in a timely manner.

Most BPOs, with the help of advanced IT equipments and professional trainers, can instantly train employees for mission critical data entry services and thus are capable of providing quality services for both short term as well as long term requirements of clients. The high quality training ensures that all their employees carry out the assigned jobs efficiently and accurately within the proposed time frame.

With the outsourcing of data entry services, most companies are able to concentrate on improving their core services and need only worry less about their daily clerical works. To add value to the services, excellent customer support is also provided by these document processing service providers. The quality document processing services provided by these firms help many corporate firms to stay competitive and profitable in the challenging business arena of today.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsourcing-Data-Entry-Services&id=1523730

Friday, 26 July 2013

About Outsourcing Data Entry Services

Data can be defined as numbers or characters that usually represent the dimensions or measurements. Data entry can be applied to any process that coverts data from one form to another. These services cover almost all business and professional services like data conversion, online and offline data entry, document and image processing; image entry, insurance claim entry, data processing, form processing, etc. Also collecting numerous data related to certain topics and then to present them in meaningful & easy to understand presentations.

Data entry services are very useful in business firms and organizations as there is a huge demand of entry work. These services are considered as the central part in any of the businesses. These services are useful to organize and manage your data/information in digital format. One of the types is data processing that generally programmed on a mainframe, minicomputer, microcomputer or personal computer. These systems are used for entry related work and to convert data into information.

About Data Entry Outsourcing
Outsourcing means to hire the services from a third party for your requirements. No sooner did outsourcing get support from the global technological development than business organizations started outsourcing entry. Data entry outsourcing is a simple contract between two different identities for any type of data entry service.

The main purpose for doing outsourcing is the availability of qualified and experienced computer operators at low cost. There are various types of entry operations such as data conversion, data processing, catalog processing services, image enhancement, image editing and photo manipulation services, etc, provided by BPO Services firms.

How helpful Services are?
o Data entry services help the companies for sharpening their foundation, analyzing their operations, strategies, policies, activities.

o Data processing services also encircle a variety of methods for how data is processed and to what extent the data is prepared to yield the best of the outcomes for the company.

o Data Conversion services help the business to convert information into easy format that is useful to increase online and offline popularity of business.

These all mechanisms help large as well as small business to enhance their internal process. These also help companies to increase their productivity and develop healthy external contacts.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?About-Outsourcing-Data-Entry-Services&id=2747714

Thursday, 25 July 2013

Data Entry Outsourcing

Data entry outsourcing is contracting with outside consultants, software houses or service bureaus to perform systems analysis, programming, and data center operations. In the U.S. in 2003, the term took on extra meaning, often referring to jobs being given to people in companies located in India and other countries. The main reason behind outsourcing is the availability of qualified and experienced computer operators at low cost.

Data entry outsourcing is limited to all types of data entry operations e.g. data conversion, document and image processing, catalog processing services, image enhancement, image editing and photo manipulation services, etc.

The need for data entry is constant for some organizations for making day to day decisions. In such cases data entry is a regular and continuous requirement. The types of companies for which this is the case are financial institutions, hospitals, lawyers, court houses, oil companies, transportation companies, Ivy League colleges, pharmaceutical companies, universities, publishing companies etc. For some other organizations data entry may be just a temporary requirement. Accurate and easily accessible data is a necessity for all.

Accumulated data is a powerful management resource. Since data entry outsourcing at lower cost is available, the latent potential of the information accumulated in data which was dumped earlier is being usefully exploited by the organization where data entry is just a temporary requirement.

The combination of digitization of media and the rush to outsource has resulted in a wide range of customers from the UK, USA, France, Norway and more than 20 other countries coming to India, China etc for data entry outsourcing.

Most of the time-consuming data entry jobs are being done by outsourcing. For example, catalog management, which involves handling and maintaining paper catalogs, is not just time consuming, but also expensive. By converting your product catalogs to online and digital catalogs, making changes, and updating your product catalog becomes as easy as the click of a button once data entry has been completed.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Outsourcing&id=222083

Friday, 19 July 2013

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Data-Mining---How-Does-it-Help-Businesses?&id=3860679

Wednesday, 17 July 2013

Data Extraction Services For Better Outputs in Your Business

Data Extraction can be defined as the process of retrieving data from an unstructured source in order to process it further or store it. It is very useful for large organizations who deal with large amount of data on a daily basis that need to be processed into meaningful information and stored for later use. The data extraction is a systematic way to extract and structure data from scattered and semi-structured electronic documents, as found on the web and in various data warehouses.

In today's highly competitive business world, vital business information such as customer statistics, competitor's operational figures and inter-company sales figures play an important role in making strategic decisions. By signing on this service provider, you will be get access to critivcal data from various sources like websites, databases, images and documents.

It can help you take strategic business decisions that can shape your business' goals. Whether you need customer information, nuggets into your competitor's operations and figure out your organization's performance, it is highly critical to have data at your fingertips as and when you want it. Your company may be crippled with tons of data and it may prove a headache to control and convert the data into useful information. Data extraction services enable you get data quickly and in the right format.

Few areas where Data Extraction can help you are:

    Capturing financial data
    Generating better sales leads
    Conducting market research, survey and analysis
    Conducting product research and analysis
    Track, extract and harvest product pricing data
    Searching for specific job postings
    Duplicating an online database
    Acquiring real estate data
    Processing auction information
    Searching online newspapers for latest pricing information
    Extracting and summarize news stories from online news sources

Outsourcing companies provide custom made data extraction services to the client's requirements. The different types of data extraction services;

    Web extraction
    Database extraction

Outsourcing is the beneficial option for large organizations seeking to manage large information. Outsourcing this services helps businesses in managing their data effectively, which in turn enables business to experience an increase in profits. By outsourcing, you can certainly increase your competitive edge and save costs too!


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Extraction-Services-For-Better-Outputs-in-Your-Business&id=2760257