People analytics is a broad area that encompasses all aspects of acquiring and managing employees, and it has largely come to replace its predecessor term, HR analytics, though that term is still in use. Besides HR analytics, talent analytics and, in some cases, workforce analytics may be used synonymously with people analytics.

FedEx Corporation is a company with a track record of being successful. FedEx believes that its success lies in the hands of how efficient its employees perform. FedEx Express volume varies from day to day. The delivery routes are designed to meet a specific demand, but the couriers must expand or reduce route coverage based on volume changes. A heuristic-based vehicle routing approach is used to solve this problem. All deliveries for a specific day are verified for a facility. The delivery routes are then optimized based on volume and drive time. The solutions are provided to the delivery couriers. A classic location analysis model is used to solve this problem. The number of shipments to and from every customer needs to be determined. Those packages must be divided into courier routes. The distance to begin each route as well, as return to building for each route must be determined. The company discovered that well-treated employees are top producers, resulting in positive company growth. In 1973, FedEx developed, and still practices, its “People-Service-Profit” philosophy denoting excellent care of its employees. The company tracks employee satisfaction with its annual Survey-Feedback-Action, and uses People Analytics program. Post-survey, management and employees meet to discuss the analysis results, address problems and interpret how to resolve them. FedEx uses people analytics successfully.

People analytics is beginning to help more companies in their recruiting, performance measurement, compensation and most importantly retention efforts. People analytics can help organizations to understand which candidates to hire, which employees are doing well, who’s receiving sufficient compensation and how employee retention can be improved. Ideally, people analytics can improve on instinct and gut feeling; for example, showing that, in some cases, a diploma certificate makes for a better employee than a master’s degree holder.

However, an upsurge of interest in people analytics points to its expansion into new territories, especially with the use of predictive analytics, and that its use is moving beyond HR into other functions such as finance, marketing, operations, logistics and R&D.

In addition, tools are being developed to expand the use of analytics. Increasingly, companies are looking up at vendors rather than building their own tools as analytics models become more extensive. As just one example, some enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors are including people analytics platforms meant to help senior executives understand attrition rates, employee costs and employee engagement profiles for specific segments and managers. People analytics are also increasingly expected to analyze teamwork and organizational relationships, which may take on finely tuned meaning as companies replace hierarchical models with more collaborative ones.

Sometimes the insights from HR data can be simple, but effective. Xerox uses it extensively to find out how to retain its customer service employees. The result is awesome. Employees who stuck with their jobs longest tended to be the ones who lived nearby and had reliable transportation. Findings like these helped Xerox decrease its attrition rate by 20% in a pilot program, which was later extended.

In another example such as IBM definitely sees the business applications for workforce science. In 2012 it spent $1.3 billion acquiring recruiting and training company Kenexa, which has a large store of data from surveying and assessing 40 million job applicants, workers and managers a year. One of the results of analyzing all this data was that IBM came to a new understanding of what makes a successful sales person. Traditionally an outgoing personality has been seen as a key trait, but IBM compared worker surveys and tests with manager assessments, and found that the most important characteristic for sales success was actually emotional courage. Successful sales people may or may not be outgoing, but they do need to be persistent, and not take no for an answer.

People analytics helps in measuring behaviors of people (new candidates, employees at different levels) and analyzing them to improve people and business performance. This is done by analyzing people data using statistical methods and software in order to make better workforce decisions. For example, to make better hiring decisions by predicting candidate success, prevent talent from quitting their job by predicting employee turnover, test which employee policies are effective and which ones are not, identify and quantify work accident risk, analyze future workforce requirement, and optimize the employee experience.

When the analytics is done well, it is not only the business that benefits; employees are also happy because it helps them to make a better fit between their wishes and needs and the organizational demands. It helps them develop themselves and utilize their potential better. They grow as better individuals.

Long tail marketing strategy refers to the strategy of targeting a large number of niche segments in markets with a product or service. Niche marketing means a marketing strategy of narrowing down focus on product/service offerings to target of small but profitable subsection of a market. Small niches in market are overlooked by dominating market leaders. The best example I can give here is of Netflix Inc. which is an American media-service provider headquartered in California, founded in 1997. The company’s primary business is its subscription-based streaming OTT (Over the Top) service which offers online streaming of a library of films and television programs, including those produced in-house. As of April 2019, Netflix has over 148 million paid subscriptions worldwide, including 60 million in the United States, and over 154 million subscriptions total including free trials.

Long Tail first came into existence because of the Internet culture seen in a significant post by Clay Shirky titled “Powerlaws, Weblogs, and Inequality” he studied why certain weblogs (the original term for blogs) had a power law distribution. It was Chris Anderson who expanded the theory to explore implication for culture, and for business, and coined the term Long Tail. He coined the term in 2004. He pointed that the products in low demand or with low sales volume can collectively make up market share or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters but only if the store or distribution channel is large enough. He pointed out that the internet gave consumers choices beyond what was offered in physical stores; e-Commerce offers niche markets the chance to appeal to their audience through major marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, Alibaba. With the wake of e-commerce growing in popularity, coupled with affordable shipping or digital downloads, there’s always someone out there looking to buy even the most specialized products. Amazon and Alibaba can buy items in large quantities, lowering the price of the product.

In many retail stores, a small group of popular items such as  Shapewear which is shaping up to be one of the best evergreen niche product in a store. For past two years in row, this product category has made to the list. By 2022, the shapewear market is expected to skyrocket to about $ 5.6 billion in sales. What started as an undergarment has transitioned to a piece for everyday wear. Similarly, in the autumn season and early winter months, plaid shirts searches re-emerge as a seasonal trend. This fashion product item has created a standalone category in retail outlets called “Plaid,” and is considered trendy. Such new niche products help the sales to soar. Many stores automatically promote these already popular items, trying to attract as many customers as they can before their competitors do. Meanwhile, their other inventory continues to sell, without special promotion. However, some stores carry such a variety of inventory that their less popular items, in total, actually make up the bulk of sales. If they plot the number of sales of each individual product, they observe that their distribution curve looks dominant like a long tail because of niche products.

Long tail marketing concentrates on innovative yet less popular products. While many marketing strategies focus on promoting a specific product or brand, long tail marketing involves more inventory management than the product promotion. The fact is this business model is based on the 80/20 rule of the Pareto principle; Amazon and Netflix stock items in centralized warehouses, while displaying them on a virtually unlimited sales floor (their website), resulting in a much lower cost for shelf maintenance. Web-page maintenance has its costs, but they are substantially lower than physical storage which requires sorting, stocking, and maintaining shelves. Meanwhile, sellers of digital products such as iTunes, or Amazon’s Kindle books don’t even require warehouse space, further reducing the maintenance costs.

A brick-and-mortar video rental store or bookstore requires so much shelf space for staking the books and videos, and must devote a significant amount of that space to stocking enough of the most popular items to meet demand. Less popular items compete with each other for limited space, and greater variety increases costs in time and energy in stocking and sorting.

The principles of long tail marketing are also applied by microfinance businesses who offer smaller loans to large groups of people all over the world. A loan of less than $100 is enough to start a business in many places. These customers, who often have no established credit history, have long been ignored by traditional banks; but now represent a significant niche market, and an important component of economic growth in many regions of the world, including Africa and Southern Asia. The plus points of long tail business strategy are as follows:

It offers lower costs to store in terms of distribution and supply: Long tail is suitable because of the lower cost of storing/stocking and near unlimited potential for distributing products. Centralized warehouses are substantially less expensive than retail chains with local stores. Winners achieve better distribution, logistics, inventory management, warehousing, and ultimately have more data to determine how to price and scale.

Lower merchandising costs: Web and mobile storefronts have the ability to display huge amounts of inventory. By reducing the search costs for the average customer, and the cost to display inventory, long tail models increase the collective share of remote and difficult to get products.

Suggestion engines:  Both Amazon and Netflix are famous for their “and you may also like” recommendation tools. It works wonders. The recommendation engines shift demand to the long tail of the demand curve, away from the hits on popular books, media, and products that drive traditional retail demand and toward niche undiscovered products. Based on the use of collaborative filters, preference for a popular product can shift demand back to hits or popular titles.

Opinion of crowd input matters: The way users find what they are looking for is often by recommendations of the volunteers, contributing connections and collaborating directly with a company to create and organize information. Google is successful in creating a long tail of web search with the direct involvement of everyone that uses Google; this contributes linked content on the web.

Data analytics informs product development: Data analytics is famous for using the customer preference data collected over time to deliver not just a marketplace of products, but original content based on deep customer intelligence. Amazon has smartly already launched its own private label brand to sell diaper products, and most recently announced future food products.

The flipside: On the flipside there has been much debate in the academic and business community about the validity of long tail as a feasible business model, and the term is no longer popular for freshly brewed startups. Many neo-entrepreneurs are challenging the potential value of long tail. However, it is worth understanding the basic assumptions which laid the foundation for early thinking in the value of internet delivery. The idea of long tail as a business model has changed with Amazon’s domination of online retail. Amazon literally dominates every possible category. A key question to authenticate a long tail theory is would a company benefit from a wider distribution of inventory, both in terms of inventory and search costs?