Simulation as a decision-making tool in a business analytics environment

Nowadays, Business Intelligence (BI) plays a key role in the decision-making chain because of what it offers in terms of data availability, structuring, analysis and presentation in the form of dashboards or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to assist decision-making. Despite its advantages in terms of historicizing the company's activity, traditional BI tools do not allow us to project our business into the future and evaluate the impact of a decision on the entire activity of a company. Given this consideration, What-if analysis positions itself as a data-intensive simulation to examine the impact of a decision. In this article, we intend to highlight the role that simulation techniques can play in prescriptive analysis. Then, we present the different architectures that combine the use of simulation in an analytical environment. Finally, we also provide an idea of the future perspectives and challenges in simulation-based analytics. © 2020 IEEE.