Is Machine Learning the New EPM Black?

I am currently a data scientist & am also a certified lean six sigma black belt. I specialize in the Big Data Finance, EPM, BI & process improvement fields where this convergence of skills has provided me the ability to understand the interactions between people, process and technology/ tools.

I would like to address the need to transform traditional EPM processes by leveraging more machine learning to help reduce forecast error and eliminate unnecessary budgeting and planning rework and cycle time using a  3 step ML approach:

1st, determine which business drivers are statistically meaningful to the forecast (correlation) , eliminating those that are not.

2nd, cluster those correlated drivers by significance to determine those that cause the most variability to the forecast (causation).

3rd, use the output of 1 and 2 as inputs to the forecast, and apply ML in order to generate a statistically accurate forward looking forecast.

 

Objection handling, in my experience, focuses on the cost,  time and the sensitive change management aspect- how I have handled these, for example, is as such :

1. Cost: all of these models can be built using free tools like R and Python data science libraries, so there is minimal to no technology/tool capEx/opEx investment.   
2. Time: most college grads with either a business, science or computer engineering degree will have undoubtedly worked with R and/or Python (and more) while earning their degree. This reduces the ramp time to get folks acclimated and up to speed. To fill the remaining skill set gap, they can use the vast libraries of work already provided by the R / Python initiatives or the many other data science communities available online for free as a starting point, which also minimizes the time due to unnecessary cycles and rework trying to define drivers based on gut feel only. 
3. Change: this is the bigger objection that has to be handled according to the business culture and openness to change. Best means of handling this is to simply show them. Proof is in the proverbial pudding so creating a variance analysis of the ML forecast, the human forecast and the actuals will speak volumes, and bonus points if the correlation and clustering analysis also surfaced previously unknown nuggets of information richness.

Even without the finding the golden nugget ticket, the CFO will certainly take notice of a more accurate forecast and appreciate the time and frustration savings from a less consuming budget and planning cycle.

KPIs in Retail & Store Analytics

I like this post. While I added some KPIs to their list, I think it is a good list to get retailers on the right path…

KPIs in Retail and Store Analytics (continuation of a post made by Abhinav on kpisrus.wordpress.com:
A) If it is a classic brick and mortar retailer:

Retail / Merchandising KPIs:

-Average Time on Shelf

-Item Staleness

-Shrinkage % (includes things like spoilage, shoplifting/theft and damaged merchandise)

Marketing KPIs:

-Coupon Breakage and Efficacy (which coupons drive desired purchase behavior vs. detract)

-Net Promoter Score (“How likely are you to recommend xx company to a friend or family member” – this is typically measured during customer satisfaction surveys and depending on your organization, it may fall under Customer Ops or Marketing departments in terms of responsibility).

-Number of trips (in person) vs. e-commerce site visits per month (tells you if your website is more effective than your physical store at generating shopping interest)

B) If it is an e-retailer :

Marketing KPIs:

-Shopping Cart Abandonment %

-Page with the Highest Abandonment

-Dwell time per page (indicates interest)

-Clickstream path for purchasers (like Jamie mentioned do they arrive via email, promotion, flash sales source like Groupon), and if so, what are the clickstream paths that they take. This should look like an upside down funnel, where you have the visitors / unique users at the top who enter your site, and then the various paths (pages) they view in route to a purchase).

-Clickstream path for visitors (take Expedia for example…Many people use them as a travel search engine but then jump off the site to buy directly from the travel vendor – understanding this behavior can help you monetize the value of the content you provide as an alternate source of revenue).

-Visit to Buy %

-If direct email marketing is part of your strategy, analyzing click rate is a close second to measuring conversion rate. 2 different KPIs, one the king , the other the queen and both necessary to understand how effective your email campaign was and whether it warranted the associated campaign cost.

Site Operations KPIs / Marketing KPIs:

-Error % Overall

-Error % by Page (this is highly correlated to the Pages that have the Highest Abandonment, which means you can fix something like the reason for the error, and have a direct path to measure the success of the change).

Financial KPIs:

-Average order size per transaction

-Average sales per transaction

-Average number of items per transaction

-Average profit per transaction

-Return on capital invested

-Margin %

-Markup %

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

You can reach me at mailto://lauraedell@me.com or you can visit my blog where I have many posts listing out various KPIs by industry and how to best aggregate them for reporting and executive presentation purposes ( http://www.lauraedell.com ).

It was very likely that I would write on KPIs in Retail or Store Analytics since my last post on Marketing and Customer Analytics. The main motive behind retailers looking into BI is ‘customer’ and how they can quickly react to changes in customer demand, rather predict customer demand, remove wasteful spending by target marketing, exceeding customer expectation and hence improve customer retention.

I did a quick research on what companies have been using as a measure of performance in retail industry and compiled a list of KPIs that I would recommend for consideration.

Customer Analytics

Customer being the key for this industry it is important to segment customers especially for strategic campaigns and to develop relationships for maximum customer retention. Understanding customer requirements and dealing with ever-changing market conditions is the key for a retail industry to survive the competition.

• Average order size per transaction
• Average sales per transaction

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BIPlayBook.Com is Now Available!

As an aside, I’m excited to announce my latest website: http://www.biplaybook.com is finally published. Essentially, I decided that you, dear readers, were ready for the next step.  What comes next, you ask?

After Measuring BI data –> Making Measurements Meaningful –> and –>Massaging Meaningful Data into Metrics, what comes next is to discuss the age-old question of ‘So What’? & ‘What Do I Do About it’?

BI PlayBook offers readers the next level of real-world scenarios now that BI has become the nomenclature of yesteryear & is used by most to inform decisions. Basically, it is the same, with the added bonus of how to tie BI back into the original business process, customer service/satisfaction process or really any process of substance within a company.

This is quite meaningful to me because so often, as consumers of goods and services, we find our voices go unheard, especially when we are left dissatisfied. Can you muster the courage to voice your issue (dare I say, ‘complain’?) using the only tools provided: poor website feedback forms, surveys or (gasp) relaying our issue by calling into a call center(s) or IVR system (double gasp)? I don’t know if I can…

How many times do we get caught in the endless loop of an IVR, only to be ‘opted-out’ (aka – hung up on) when we do not press the magical combination of numbers on our keypads to reach a live human being, or when we are sneaky, pressing ‘0’ only to find out the company is one step ahead of us, having programmed ‘0’ to automatically transfer your call to our friend:  ‘ReLisa Boutton’ – aka the Release Button().

Feedback is critical, especially as our world has become consumed by social networks. The ‘chatter’ of customers that ensues, choosing to ‘Like’ or join our company page or product, or tweet about the merits or demerits of one’s value proposition, is not only rich if one cares about understanding their customer. But, it is also a key into how well you are doing in the eyes of your customer. Think about how many customer satisfaction surveys you have taken ask you whether or not your would recommend a company to a friend or family member.

This measure defines one’s NPR, or Net Promoter Rank, and is a commonly shared KPI or key performance indicator for a company.

Yet, market researchers like myself know that what a customer says on a survey isn’t always how they will behave. This discrepancy between what someone says and what someone does is as age-old as our parents telling us as children “do not as I do, but as I say.” However, no longer does this paradigm hold true. Therefore, limiting oneself by their NPR score will restrict the ability to truly understand one’s Voice of the Customer. And further, if you do not understand your customer’s actual likelihood to recommend to others or repeat purchase from you, how can you predict their lifetime value or propensity for future revenue earnings? You can’t.

Now, I am ranting. I get it.

But I want you to understand that social media content that is available from understanding the social network spheres can fill that gap. They can help you understand how your customers truly perceive your goods or services. Trust me, customers are more likely to tweet (use Twitter) to vent in 140 characters or less about a negative experience than they are to take the time to fill out a survey. Likewise, they are more likely to rave about a great experience with your company.

So, why shouldn’t this social ‘chatter’ be tied back into the business intelligence platforms, and further, mined out specifically to inform customer feedback loops, voice of the customer & value stream maps, for example?

Going one step further, having a BI PlayBook focuses the attention of the metric owners on the areas that needs to be addressed, while filtering out the noise that can detract from the intended purpose.

If we are going to make folks responsible for the performance of a given metric, shouldn’t we also help them understand what is expected of them up front, as opposed to when something goes terribly wrong, signified by the “text message” tirade of an overworked CEO waking you out of your slumber at 3 AM?

Further, understanding how to address an issue, who to communicate to and most importantly, how to resolve and respond to affected parties are all part of a well conceived BI playbook.

It truly takes BI to that next level. In fact, two years ago, I presented this very topic at the TDWI Executive Summit in San Diego (Tying Business Processes into your Business Intelligence). While I got a lot of  stares ala ‘dog tilting head to the side in that confused glare at owner look’, I hope people can draw back on that experience with moments of ‘ah ha – that is what she meant’ now that they have evolved ( a little) in their BI maturation growth.

To Start Quilting, One Just Needs a Set of Patterns: Deconstructing Neural Networks (my favorite topic de la journée, semaine ou année)

 

How a Neural Network Works:

A neural network (#neuralnetwork) uses rules it “learns” from patterns in data to construct a hidden layer of logic. The hidden layer then processes inputs, classifying them based on the experience of the model. In this example, the neural network has been trained to distinguish between valid and fraudulent credit card purchases.

This is not your mom’s apple pie or the good old days of case-based reasoning or fuzzy logic. (Although, the latter is still one of my favorite terms to say. Try it: fuzzzzyyyy logic. Rolls off the tongue, right?)…But I digress…

And, now, we’re back.

To give you a quick refresher:

Case based reasoning represents knowledge as a database of past cases and their solutions. The system uses a six-step process to generate solutions to new problems encountered by the user.

We’re talking old school, folks…Think to yourself, frustrating FAQ pages, where you type a question into a search box, only to have follow on questions prompt you for further clarification and with each one, further frustration. Oh and BTW, the same FAQ pages which e-commerce sites laughably call ‘customer support’ –

“ And, I wonder why your ASCI customer service scores are soo low Mr. or Mrs. e-Retailer :),” says this blogger facetiously, to her audience .

 

 

 

And, we’re not talking about fuzzy logic either – Simply put, fuzzy logic is fun to say, yes, and technically is:

–> Rule-based technology with exceptions (see arrow 4)

–> Represents linguistic categories (for example, “warm”, “hot”) as ranges of values

–> Describes a particular phenomenon or process and then represents in a diminutive number of flexible rules

–> Provides solutions to scenarios typically difficult to represent with succinct IF-THEN rules

(Graphic: Take a thermostat in your home and assign membership functions for the input called temperature. This becomes part of the logic of the thermostat to control the room temperature. Membership functions translate linguistic expressions such as “warm” or “cool” into quantifiable numbers that computer systems can then consume and manipulate.)

 

Nope, we are talking Neural Networks – the absolute Bees-Knees in my mind, right up there with social intelligence and my family (in no specific order :):

–> Find patterns and relationships in massive amounts of data that are too complicated for human to analyze

–> “Learn” patterns by searching for relationships, building models, and correcting over and over again model’s own mistakes

–> Humans “train” network by feeding it training data for which inputs produce known set of outputs or conclusions, to help neural network learn correct solution by example

–> Neural network applications in medicine, science, and business address problems in pattern classification, prediction, financial analysis, and control and optimization

 

Remember folks: Knowledge is power and definitely an asset. Want to know more? I discuss this and other intangibles further in part 1 of a multi-part study I am conducting called:

Measuring Our Intangible Assets, by Laura Edell

Re-visiting Organizational Objectives and Values

Simplistically speaking, the BSCOL (Balanced Scorecard Collaborative) defines the cascaded model approach for linking corporate values with individual’s performance review goals/objectives. Starting at the bottom and looking at what each individual’s personal goals are, and flowing up from there to the departmental goals, the division goals and finally the executive tier strategy/vision/goals/objectives, will help you to see where you have gaps in your values to what your employees are driving your company towards, versus where you have alignment.

 

Restructuring those values either at the top (harder) or at the individual contributor level at the bottom (easier) to ensure alignment will both drive better performance from your people because of the visibility offered to them by demonstrating how what they are tasked to complete in a year are contributing factors to helping the company achieve its organizational values. If your start with existing values, and then add what the existing objectives are as a starting point, see if you can map those together. 9x out of 10, they will NOT be aligned and that is a big AH-HA for many leaders to see on paper.

 

Then start to cascade from there to the division leader tier, the department management tier and lastly, to the individual contributors. That is the vertical alignment process from top to bottom, if that is your preference. Once you have these vertical lines mapped, look to see overlap or conflicting values between divisions, departments and people and find affinity areas that can be mapped logically back to the values where you started (in a top down approach). BSCOL.ORG and my blog (shameless plug) are both great resources offering excellent templates to assist in this process, like strategy maps. (See graphic provided by the TDWI BI Journal below) with a twist = Instead of using the 4 perspectives or in conjunction with (as that is very valuable in and of itself), use your organizational hierarchy instead. Financial becomes CEO’s Established Organizational values/objectives, Customer becomes the divisions that report into the CEO where the circles become that divisions values / goals/objectives, Internal becomes the departments and Learning and Growth becomes the Individual Contributors objectives that their manager lists out in those pesky annual performance reviews

 

(sorry to those big believers but until true performance management like what I have outlined is institutional in all companies, the PR system is a bell curved sham where some of the best employees get the short end of the bell curve stick because how could one department have all highest performers even if they are a crackerjack team of employees. One day…A girl can dream right?…)

 

-Laura Edell Gibbons