Author: Mariah Donahue

Stanley Black & Decker

Posted on by Mariah Donahue

SBD LogoThe UConn Business School and CABA have been great partners for STANLEY Healthcare. We knew that we had some data issues within our business and our company had just started a partnership with UConn to utilize students within the program. As we embarked down the road of this initial project, we really did not know what to expect. It was eye-opening to see the effort and quality of work that was put forth by the students in the program.

Our problem statement read, “Due to a history of acquisitions, STANLEY Healthcare’s Selling, General & Administrative (SG&A) expense detail is split across four ERP systems (2 Instances Of Great Plains, SAP and Priority). As the business targets to reduce and/or reallocate SG&A investments to new initiatives, we need a “visualization tool” that will allow us to consolidate the SG&A expenses from four systems. Ideally, this tool will provide a sustainable and repeatable process to filter and drill into the SG&A expense detail to understand savings opportunities.”

Students were provided with the data set with a few parameters, and they took off running. One of the things that we found interesting was that each group had their own approach. It was interesting to see that through all these different approaches, the end result and the conclusions that could be made from the different tools were so similar. Data Analytics is something that is new to me, and my company. CABA has not only shown us what the possibilities and potential is for Data Analytics, they also delivered a tool that we are in the process of productionizing. It has been a win/win for both STANLEY Healthcare and the students of CABA who get to apply their schooling in real world scenarios.

I hope that we can find ways to partner with them again soon!

CIGNA

Posted on by Mariah Donahue

CABA and UConn School of Business faculty have been great partners of Cigna over Fall 202. As we embarked on our Technology Operations AIOps journey, UConn students were provided with two problem statements focused around validating if our data had enough predictive power to help improve operational efficiency at Cigna.

Students were provided with de-identified dataset with multiple parameters. It was interesting to observe how each of the 8 teams approached the problem statements in their own unique way and their collective strength achieved the scale of experimentation that would not have been otherwise possible. To be a UConn BAPM Alum and work with the current cohort was a unique experience and is great to see the advances the program has made in the past 5 years.

Lastly, I want to sincerely thank John Wilson and Jennifer Eigo for helping us at each step of this partnership. Will definitely look forward to additional opportunities to partner with the BAPM program.

 

Shashank Navuduri, Senior Manager

Travelers

Posted on by Mariah Donahue

Travelers is a top 10 personal insurance carrier with millions of customers and  product offerings spanning auto, property, and specialty insurance. Today, Travelers customers receive several forms of communication, including messages regarding their billing and policy information, as well as product and service offerings. Historically, these forms of communication have been executed and measured in siloed business units.

Business challenge:

Students were provided a sample dataset containing customer attributes and outbound communications and were tasked with examining the relationship between communications and customer behavior. They were encouraged to build visualizations and statistical models to find insights, quantify the effect of communication on customer behavior, and create a story based on their recommendations.

The students did a great job of using the sponsor dataset to visualize customer journeys and profile customer attributes. They provided insights around customers’ paperless preferences and electronic communications, characteristics that correlated to customer churn, and communication types with positive engagement. Several teams supplemented their findings and recommendations with external research. The students also did a phenomenal job of balancing detailed analytics and recommendations when presenting their work to both technical and business audiences.

“The UConn capstone gave us an opportunity to work closely with 8 talented teams, each with a different perspective and story to tell. Their recommendations had real world applicability and, in some cases, re-affirmed our internal findings. To be a BAPM alum with a chance to sponsor a capstone was a truly unique and exciting opportunity.”

– Prasanthi Lingamallu, Director, Personal Insurance Marketing Analytics

Atlas Air Worldwide

Posted on by Mariah Donahue

Atlas Air Worldwide is a leading global provider of outsourced aircraft and aviation operating services. From shipping precious perishables or heavy construction equipment to arranging large-group passenger charters for celebrities or dignitaries, Atlas Air’s technologically advanced fleet of 747s, 777s, 767s and 737s offers flexible, creative and award-winning solutions that meet our customer’s unique needs – quickly, safely and reliably.

 

Atlas partnered with UConn as an outgrowth of the Company’s Elevate Initiative, an organization-wide movement to identify, innovate and facilitate opportunities to transform Atlas’ employee experience. As part of their capstone project, 37 graduate students in the Business Analytics and Project Management program were asked to develop and propose solutions to help optimize flight schedules – a significant factor impacting the quality of work life for crewmembers at Atlas. The students were challenged to find insights that would meet the requirements of Atlas customers, who look to the airline for flexibility, while taking into account crewmembers’ needs for consistency and predictability. After analyzing and compiling fully de-identified flight data records, the students presented their findings and final recommendations.

“These were some bright young people who were interested in Atlas and in the air freight business as a whole, and it really showed in their work,” said Scott Lindsay, Vice President, Crew Planning and Analysis. “They had some really good suggestions and ideas about how to approach the complex data available to us. The Company is reviewing those ideas with a plan to incorporate some of them – or elements of them – into future improvements. This was a very important exercise in our on-going efforts to improve scheduling, and these insights will help shape our thinking.”

Unscrambl

Posted on by Mariah Donahue

It was a pleasure working with UConn, CABA and Prof Eigo for the capstone project. The students in the business analytics course were very creative, enthusiastic and resourceful as they went about using our product and the provided datasets to extract insights from marketing-related datasets for our customers.

Our mission at Unscrambl is to simplify access to data and insights for both technical and non-technical business users using natural language-based interfaces. At the time we started working on the capstone, we had released a couple of new features, especially around automated data story-telling, along with an emphasis on providing insights on marketing use-cases. The students in the course were given the challenge of using our conversational AI product for exploring marketing datasets from multiple customers, creating stories from these datasets, and coming up with story templates that we could incorporate in our product.

We gained a lot of value from the project, both in terms of ideas for marketing data story templates as well as in terms of valuable insights on the usability of our product. The students also provide great feedback on how our product could be further improved in terms of new user on-boarding, analytics and collaboration features. The students were also given the opportunity to present their findings to our customers, which they did a great job in. We hope that they gained valuable experience in uncovering and presenting stories on real-world datasets.

Anand Ranganathan
Chief AI Officer

Clorox

Posted on by Mariah Donahue

Clorox LogoClorox disinfecting wipes are the star products of Clorox, having a lion’s share of sales amongst its competitors. The company has been traditionally using just the past sales data for forecasting its immediate future demand. The major problem with these kinds of models are they do not take into account some of the very influential factors which strongly effects the sales, creating unknown pulse periods. This causes the inventory to either come short of the market demand , resulting in losing the existing customers to competitors or exceeding the market demand, which may result in over stocking the inventory. Both of which leads to loss.

By using sophisticated models which could correctly predict the sales due to influential factors, Clorox could clearly handle their inventory better and reach the market in a timely manner. Identifying the pulse periods will give the company a competitive edge in creating new marketing strategies to increase market demand. In addition, rolling out inventory at the opportune time assists in customer retention and increases overall sales.

  • Analyze the factors affecting the sales of disinfecting wipes
  • Determine the drivers behind pulse periods
  • Build model based on previous sales data
  • Predict the unit sales for the year 2016

Priceline

Posted on by Mariah Donahue

Priceline partnered with UConn to sponsor a capstone project for second year students in the MSBAPM program. 

Priceline Logo

Students directly applied their academic knowledge to identify how Priceline can better target the more than 2 billion promotional emails sent every year. After analyzing a sample of anonymized search and booking data, students presented final recommendations to Priceline’s product analytics and marketing teams.

Basement Systems

Posted on by Mariah Donahue

Seeking insights into the home improvement market, Basement Systems Inc. (www.basementsystems.com) partnered with the UConn Business Analytics and Project Management program on several inter-related projects over the course of two years. A division of Contractor Nation, Basement Systems is headquartered in Seymour, Connecticut and comprises a nationwide network of home improvement Basement Systems Logocontractors offering basement waterproofing, foundation repair, insulation, mold prevention, and radon mitigation.

Graduate students in the program analyzed externalities that might affect demand for home improvement services, looking at the effect of weather, energy costs, the real estate market, and other geographic, economic, and demographic data. Other analyses looked at the cost effectiveness of different marketing channels and other factors affecting a company’s growth, including social media presence, competition, and reviews.

In addition to data analyses, the students used text mining tools to explore customer sentiment as expressed in online reviews. “These insights into our customers are an important factor in understanding market dynamics,” explained Jenny Hui Liu, a graduate of the program and Data Analyst at Basement Systems who worked with the students on the project’s parameters.

Richard Fencil, head of the Treehouse Internet Group, (www.treehouseinternetgroup.com) the company’s in-house marketing agency, said the results of the projects were being used in a number of ways. “The insights were immediately helpful in mapping the customer journey, expanding weather-related advertising, and our ability to provide support to our contractor network through our year-round training programs. The more we understand the interplay between reviews, referrals and online research, the clearer it is that a contractor has to deliver exceptional service to grow its business.”

Pentation Analytics

Posted on by Mariah Donahue

Pentation Analytics is a Big Data Analytics company that enables insurers and intermediaries to better engage with policy holders. We provide predictive intelligence and process automation tools that address the core insurance use-cases of increasing retention, crPentation Analyticsoss-sales and optimizing claims. We are based out of Hartford, Connecticut and we are highly engaged with UConn’s Center for the Advancement of Business Analytics (CABA).

Pentation Analytics and CABA organized a hackathon focused on customer retention. Customer retention is a global business problem area in which much work is being done, but it is still not enough. The problem statement read “Insurance customer retention insights through dashboards”. Students were given P&C Insurance carrier data, both structured and unstructured. Student turnout was overwhelming and it was very interesting how the teams approached the problem. In addition, seeing data from their eyes was an amazing and enriching experience. In terms of the student experience, we hope inputs provided by our team during presentations will help these talented students to bridge the academic-Industry gap.

The hackathon was very successful and we look forward to many more fruitful endeavors between Pentation and CABA.

-Prahant Roy, Pentation Analytics

Aureus Analytics

Posted on by Mariah Donahue

Aureus Analytics was born to fulfill the need to do more with your data but with lesser tools. What started as a need to have access to real time insights at the point of decision, has now blossomed into a smorgasbord of highly energetic and restless individuals creating a great product to revolutionize customer experience in Insurance Industry.

After meeting with CABA and learning about the program structure and how CABA engages with industry for the benefit of the students as well as the industry, we were impressed. The endeavor to keep the engagements symbiotic was very visible and absolutely novel. In our CABA Data Challenge, our approach was to engage the students by introducing them to something new and exciting. We built the challenge around a customer experience paradigm and demonstrated our concepts and technology to them in an extensive two phase process. In phase I, the students were exposed to our application and its use via a simulated demo, and a simple quiz was then used to assess and select the suitable candidates for phase II. Phase II was more extensive. Direct access to our technologies and sample data was provided to them to evaluate the customer events and experience paradigm.

The commitment and feedback from the students was phenomenal and encouraging. They understood and critiqued the approach in a very constructive way. They also took the initiative and analyzed the data from a customer perspective. We are looking forward to selecting a few students for an internship to carry forward the engagement that was established with this Data Challenge. We sincerely thank the CABA team of Anna Radziwillowicz, Jennifer Eigo & John Wilson for all their help and support. We look forward to more similar engagements, projects and Data Challenges.
-Nitin Purohit, Co-founder & CTO