or becoming a value to employers?

I'm thinking about taking an analytics certificate course such as this:

https://executiveeducation.wha...alytics-certificate/

Math was never my strength throughout school. In grad school, the toughest courses to me were stats, financial accounting and finance. But I don't want to shy away from my weakness, I want to make it a strength.

Any thoughts on the future of analytics and courses like these?

It can be tremendously useful IF IF IF you have a business that can benefit from it, and more importantly, can capture enough good data to run valid models.

For example; when I was with the supply chain for Burger King, we had all the POS data from over 85% of the restaurants in the United States. We also had 100% of the supply side data for orders flowing through the distribution centers that fed the system.

From that data, we understood what a $0.10 increase in the price of a Whopper Sandwich would do to system sales volume. From that sort of data, you could calculate the optimum price for a menu item for each market to hit the sweet spot of sales volume and profitability. Same thing with profitability of small/medium/large and how you needed to price, and market those variations.

From the other side, we also knew what an advertising promotion with a coupon would do to order volume in a particular market, so we could pre-load additional supplies of that product into the supply chain to ensure that the restaurants didn't run out.

For an organization the size if BK, analytics is essential. But understand that the data collection, storage and analysis systems, and people to make sense of it are expensive, and only available to really large organizations.

Doing analytics at a one outlet family owned pizza joint will give you some useful information about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, and may provide insight into appropriate menu mix, but it won't make the difference that it does to a large org.

Mathematics is a critical life skill.
However you get those skills, get them.
They may be boring, they were to me when I was in school, but they are essential.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: 220-9er,

There was a recent Buffet interview in which he was asked what was the most important skill. He replied Communication skills both oral and written. He made reference to Dale Carnegie as well. It made a lot of sense to me.

It depends on how you are set up, etc. We deliver to larger customers/schedule production on which flavors are sold in which weeks. Similarly, we are able to tell them how they should allocate their freezer space.

what artie said

My company uses analytics all the time and still manages to get most things wrong.

It’s a tool like anything else. If you know how to use them in a manner appropriate for your company you can get a clearer picture of what is actually going on daily/weekly/monthly/etc. The caveat is the people setting them up have to understand what they are trying to measure and they have to be committed to the process required to be accurate.

I was involved with one situation where I had stopped doing certain reporting because for a novel worth of reasons, we didn’t have accurate data. I was told that analytics was very important and if I didn’t have accurate data, I should just make up a number that I thought was close so that we didn’t get in trouble for not filling out our weekly reports. They would rather I report incorrect information than not report at all.

Analytics are only going to become more and more of the norm across more industries. Right now, our business analysis we get our territory data from, was a poly sci major at UCLA, yet, she's a wiz at Excel, combining a ton of tables and running crazy macros.

We went through a phase in our department where the Analytics Tail was allowed to Wag the Dog. Report writing time trippled, customers became highly annoyed with the additional required information from them. Having said that Analytics has a place IMO. There just needs to be intelligence and common sense in the gathering and crunching of the data.

Does your employer care what you have to say? Did they ever listen to or implement one of your ideas/proposals? Are you even in a position to give your opinion or ideas?

It has its place.

For example, large multinational corporations since data is all over the world on multiple systems and/or servers and having an analytics group makes sense (even better, if you can drive it down to the business lines). Additionally, having spreadsheets on people's hard drives, servers (one of hundreds), and SharePoints (also, one of hundreds) means too many silos and there are much more powerful tools (e.g. JUMP) that blow away Excel.

I spent three years putting together data sets for our Tableau analytics system. It's easy to get the data right but hard as hell for the analytics team to get right. After about two years they finally started producing useful info. Not sure how much your certificate would cost (Wharton doesn't sound cheap to me, it is Ivy League) but its a really hot field right now.

I don't know a thing about that particular Cert or its market value.

I am no fan of the Certification trends and industry, in general.

However, the analytical skills themselves are obviously useful in just about any industry.

of course--- knowledge is power

but interpreting the data and using it to make sound decisions is the hard part

have seen many times my company take the data and use it to justify the wrong / bad decisions

------------------------------

It is a pain to gather all the data/figure out what is useful, etc, but I’m hard pressed to think of anything more useful. Everything from costs, to time, to sales.

Even at our tiny level, it’s vital.

I’d really like a “view of everything”. Some kind of system which shows every expense, and sale, and the amount of time each product and sale takes to make/the ability to track individual performance.

Hard to do at a small level, and I think even larger companies have a harder time getting it. (EG, I think grocers should look at evaluating cashiers by “sales per hour,” and base pay on how many dollars per hour a cashier processes, relative to time and position - but I suppose it makes more sense to focus on eliminating the position, entirely.)

You bet, Absolutely. A skill in huge demand. If you don’t use the data, you’re going to fall behind. People that have the capabilities—as well as an understanding of business contexts—are going to be the ones that will add the most value and have the greatest impact. Through learning how to recognize trends, test hypotheses, and draw conclusions from population samples, you can build an analytical framework that can be applied in your everyday decision-making and help your organization thrive.

Anal what now? I like the idea of making money but this sounds like it's not up my alley.



OK, I see the problem here- I think I'm funny. Sorry. {leaves thread, closes door quietly}

quote:

Originally posted by Micropterus:
My company uses analytics all the time and still manages to get most things wrong.

Is it more of incompetent management than anything else?

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
I don't know a thing about that particular Cert or its market value.

I am no fan of the Certification trends and industry, in general.

However, the analytical skills themselves are obviously useful in just about any industry.

Why are you not a fan of certifications?

Some of them are really highly thought of such as PMP. I was told by a friend who works for a major consulting firm that PMP really pops out on a resume. Personally I don't understand it that much myself, either. I mean, if someone has many years of project management experience, you're going to hire a kid with a PMP certificate over the experience? Doesn't make sense to me.