The 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!
Clorox 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.