Retail

New Rexer Analytics survey

March 30, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
I recently got the survey results from the annual data mining survey that Karl Rexer of Rexer Analytics runs. You can get the summary here or the full results from Karl but here are my thoughts:

Data mining is everywhere. The most cited areas are CRM / Marketing and Financial Services with a [...]

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First Look – FICO Xpress and Business Rules

February 17, 2010

Optimization is a mathematical process for finding the best decision for a given business problem – usually highest profit, lowest cost given a set of constraints. Involve applying an algorithm to data, decision variables, constraints and an objective function. In financial services and insurance optimization is still fairly new (unlike, say, supply chain) but the [...]

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Marketing Mix Modeling at Walmart Financial Services #pawcon

February 16, 2010

Final Predictive Analytics World presentation for me – Walmart Financial Services and Mu Sigma talking about marketing mix modeling. Walmart Financial Services focuses on the unbanked or under-banked. Specific services like money transfers, check cashing can be quite high volume in some locations and some 1,000 locations have branded MoneyCenters. Mu Sigma is an Indian [...]

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First Look – Quantivo

February 11, 2010

I got a briefing from Quantivo recently. This is a company focused on behavioral analytics – uncovering patterns within the mountains of customer data that companies have – web analytics and point of sale data for instance. They help companies find these patterns, find the insight that they are not seeing with their current tools, [...]

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Analytic truth and myth

November 19, 2009

Alison Bolen posted a nice list of analytic truths, or perhaps myths, on the SAS blog today and asked what people thought. I was, of course, unable to resist:

To make analytics successful, the CEO has to have a personal interest in it. MYTH
While it is true that the only companies I see who have made [...]

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Analytics in the executive suite – a #PBLS panel

October 28, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
I am at the Premier Business Leadership Series, SAS/BetterManagement.com’s event, and I got to attend a great panel on Analytics in the Executive Suite. Barbara Pindar of Aeropostale, Eric Webster of State Farm Insurance, Cameron Davies of Disney and Keith Collins of SAS made up the panel. Each panelist gave [...]

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SAS – An executive overview

October 27, 2009

I am spending some time as a guest of SAS this week and we got started today with Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. He began by describing SAS Institute’s 33 years of continuous revenue growth as well as similarly growing reinvestment in R&D. SAS has not laid anyone off this year, for which kudos, and [...]

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Lands End needs some decisioning power

August 28, 2009

It’s been a while since I have used Lands End but just recently I needed to order some logo wear for my son’s school and they used Lands End as the supplier for this. I logged on, used the “find your school” option and found the code for my son’s school. The website then remembered [...]

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Decision Management Job – Head of Business Development USA

August 12, 2009

My friends at Marketelligent are looking for a head of business development for the US. Marketelligent is a Bangalore-based consulting firm providing a range of analytics services to global clients and across various domains – consumer banking, insurance, telecom, retail, manufacturing, travel, etc. Services provided include simple MIS and reporting all the way to [...]

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Recommendation Engines- not as Complicated as You Think

July 15, 2009

Some time ago I saw this interesting little post -Recommendation Engine Secrets We Don’t Want You to Know: It’s not as Complicated as We’d Have You Think – that made the point that:
Most recommendation engines use one of a handful of methods that are well understood
And they are correct, of course. Recommendation engines involve some [...]

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An update on the warranty industry

March 11, 2009

Eric Arnum, editor of Warranty Week, gave an overview of the industry as a whole. Clearly the recession is taking its toll. Starting with new home builders it has spread to RV makers, auto makers, various retailers, GE and others. Warranty is important in many of these company’s challenges and some, like Hyundai, are trying [...]

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Predictive Modeling for E-Mail Marketing

February 20, 2009

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
Arthur Hughes (author of Strategic Database Marketing) and Anna Lu of e-Dialog.com presented on predictive modeling for e-mail marketing. Arthur has been developing databases for database marketing for 30 years or so. Initially he focused on databases but found that people could not use them to make money and that led [...]

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The unrealized power of data

February 20, 2009

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
Andreas Weigend, former amazon.com Chief Scientist, gave a keynote on the unrealized power of data. He started with a historical perspective. In the 70s perhaps 10M used computers, mostly in the back office. By the 80s this had reached 100M and the front office. By the 90s the internet and search [...]

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DIALOG Keynotes – ILOG and IBM

February 4, 2009

Pierre Haren started up the keynotes with some personal comments about the excitement of being part of IBM, seeing more customers at DIALOG and hearing stories from customers about what they are doing with ILOG products. He is clearly enthused by the opportunity to reach more companies by being part of IBM than they ever [...]

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Analytics run amok?

February 3, 2009

Joe McKendrick pointed me to a story on ABC News today -  ‘Good Morning America’ Gets Answers: Some Credit Card Companies Financially Profiling Customers. The story is worrying and has some good reporting in but, as usual, the analytics behind the whole thing are poorly described.
So, first things first. The headline gets us off on [...]

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With Data Mining you can even scare Walmart…

January 16, 2009

BusinessWeek had an interesting article in December about the growth of Tesco, a British grocery chain, and on its use of data mining as a competitive weapon. Here’s a quote:
Analysts say that Tesco’s big advantage over major international rivals, which also include Germany’s Aldi and Lidl, is its unrivaled ability to manage vast reams of [...]

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Transforming retail with analytics and decision management

January 12, 2009

Tom Davenport has done some research into analytics and retail (reported here: Retailers recognise analytics as key to business transformation. Here’s a quote from the new item:
Retailers today are searching for ways to derive more customer intelligence, marketing savvy and operational insight from their overflowing databases. In addition to acknowledging that the use of analytics [...]

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First Look – Sonetto Retail

December 29, 2008

I got a briefing on IVIS Group’s Sonetto product this week. Sonetto is most famous as the platform for Tesco’s multi-channel strategy. Sonetto is a product designed to focus on multi-channel operations, especially (but not exclusively) multi-channel retail. They make the very valid point that multi-channel retail is complex. Not only do retailers have multiple [...]

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On Best Buy’s success and being decision-centric

November 19, 2008

Last week I saw a post comparing Best Buy and Circuit City – one thriving and one going into bankruptcy – and it made me think about the role of decision management in Best Buy’s success. I have head Best Buy present various times an a number of elements of their successful customer-centricity strategy are [...]

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Integrating Predictive Analytics and BRM to Improve Health Plan Member Experience

October 30, 2008

Two gentlemen from Deloitte presented Integrating Predictive Analytics and BRM to Improve Health Plan Member Experience. 80% of healthcare costs are incurred by 20% of members and traditionally the 20% get all the focus. Analytics and data mining get applied to claims, authorization, costs as a result. Segmentation focuses on the unprofitable and unhealthy. Increasingly [...]

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