Author Archives: Teddy Nee

How Statisticians Found Air France Flight 447 Two Years After It Crashed Into Atlantic

Posted on by

How Statisticians Found Air France Flight 447 Two Years After It Crashed Into Atlantic

After more than a year of unsuccessful searching, authorities called in an elite group of statisticians. Working on their recommendations, the next search found the wreckage just a week later.

“In the early morning hours of June 1, 2009, Air France Flight AF 447, with 228 passengers and crew aboard, disappeared during stormy weather over the Atlantic while on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.” So begin Lawrence Stone and colleagues from Metron Scientific Solutions in Reston, Virginia, in describing their role in the discovery of the wreckage almost two years after the loss of the aircraft.

Stone and co are statisticians who were brought in to reëxamine the evidence after four intensive searches had failed to find the aircraft. What’s interesting about this story is that their analysis pointed to a location not far from the last known position, in an area that had almost certainly been searched soon after the disaster. The wreckage was found almost exactly where they predicted at a depth of 14,000 feet after only one week’s additional search.

Today, Stone and co explain how they did it. Their approach was to use a technique known as Bayesian inference which takes into account all the prior information known about the crash location as well as the evidence from the unsuccessful search efforts. The result is a probability distribution for the location of the wreckage.

Share your opinion with us by leaving comments below. Thanks for reading. Share this article if you think that it would be useful for others. If you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to send us a messageor leave comments.

 

Related articles

Inventory Analysis: Affordable, Available, Actionable

Posted on by

Inventory Analysis: Affordable, Available, Actionable

For any manufacturer or distributor, the problem with inventory management is easily stated. Simply put, there’s often too much of the stuff that isn’t selling—and far too little of the stuff that is selling.

The result? Disappointed customers, stock-outs and lost sales—combined with shelves groaning with inventory that nobody wants.

Put like that, the mismatch sounds almost comic. But to companies wrestling with just this problem, it’s a quandary that’s very real, and far from laughable.

For in today’s business climate, lost sales and disappointed would-be customers can be very bad news indeed. What’s more, the financial drain of financing unwanted inventory can be crippling. Because while banks are admittedly more willing to lend than they were at the height of the financial crisis, borrowing limits are tight, and terms are expensive.

So what’s to be done?

Inventory analysis: cheaper than ERP, easier than best-of-breed.

Fancy inventory optimization algorithms can help, of course. So can advanced forecasting techniques.
The latter help you to more accurately predict the customer demand that you’ll face; the former help you to better meet those customer demands with available stock.

Inventory analysis: under control, faster and cheaper.

Which is why, of course, so many manufacturers and distributors—especially those with elderly or partially-implemented ERP systems—try the ‘sticking plaster’ approach of spreadsheet-based analysis.

Inventory analysis: self-financing actionable insights.

At Matillion, we know that most of our customers come to us wanting a low-cost, effective Cloud BI solution that can be implemented quickly. And usually, financial reporting and analysis is fairly high on their agendas.

Do you like this article? Share this article if you like and if you have any opinions, leave us comments below or send us a message.

Related articles

Five factors of supply chain sustainability

Posted on by

The five factors of supply chain sustainability

Leadership, empowerment and sharing success stories are among the attributes required to implement sustainable procurement.

That’s according to a panel of experts who shared their top tips at the Institute for Supply Management annual conference in Las Vegas, US last week. The advice included:

  1. Sustainability champions : “Find out who’s passionate about this in your organisation and ask them to be champions.”
  2. Leadership : “You are all leaders to your supply chain, they’re looking to you and your actions and expectations.”
  3. Empowerment : “If you give people a ladder to execute in their own fashion they will take ownership of it.”
  4. Success : “Nothing sells better than success, so we recognise and reward success.”
  5. Metrics : “If you can communicate what you [have done], it is really a powerful story.”

Do you have any opinions? Leave your comments below or send us a message.

Related articles

The economics of adultery

Posted on by

The economics of adultery

The financial crisis of 2008 may have driven many people to betray their wedding vows, according to data from Ashley Madison, an unusual and apparently very popular dating Web site for those seeking extramarital relations.

Ashley Madison has expanded rapidly, but 2008 was a banner year for the company. According to the site, membership swelled 166 percent worldwide that year and 192 percent in the United States, compared with average yearly growth of 50 percent worldwide and 71 percent domestically since the site’s launch 12 years ago. Each month, around 130 million people around the world visit Ashley Madison.

Analysts at Ashley Madison found evidence of a relationship between the economy and infidelity when they examined user data in individual states. They compared the change in the number of employed people in each state with the growth in Ashley Madison’s membership there. The tentative conclusion: People who’ve lost their jobs might be more likely to cheat — or, at least, are more likely to sign up for an adultery dating site.

What do you think about this article? Interesting? Leave your comments below or send us a message.

Related articles

Hadoop and Data Warehouses

Posted on by

Hadoop and Data Warehouses

I see a lot of confusion when it comes to Hadoop and its role in a data warehouse solution.  Hadoop should not be a replacement for a data warehouse, but rather should augment/complement a data warehouse.  Hadoop and a data warehouse will often work together in a single information supply chain: Hadoop excels in handling raw, unstructured and complex data with vast programming flexibility; Data warehouses, on the other hand, manage structured data, integrating subject areas and providing interactive performance through BI tools.

There are three main use cases for Hadoop with a data warehouse, with the above picture an example of use case 3:

1. Archiving data warehouse data to Hadoop (move)
Hadoop as cold storage/Long Term Raw Data Archiving:
– So don’t need to buy bigger PDW or SAN or tape

2. Exporting relational data to Hadoop (copy)
Hadoop as backup/DR, analysis, cloud use:
– Export conformed dimensions to compare incoming raw data with what is already in PDW
– Can use dimensions against older fact table
– Sending validated relational data to Hadoop
– Hadoop data to WASB and have that used by other tools/products (i.e. Cloud ML Studio)
– Incremental Hadoop load / report

3. Importing Hadoop data into data warehouse (copy)
Hadoop as staging area:
– Great for real-time data, social networks, sensor data, log data, automated data, RFID data (ambient data)
– Where you can capture the data and only pass the relevant data to PDW
– Can do processing of the data as it sits in Hadoop (clean it, aggregate it, transform it)
– Some processing is better done on Hadoop instead of SSIS
– Way to keep staging data
– Long-term raw data archiving on cheap storage that is online all the time (instead of tape) – great if need to keep the data for legal reasons
– Others can do analysis on it and later pull it into data warehouse if find something useful

Thanks for reading this article. If you have any opinions, please leave a comment below or send us a message

.Related articles

The TOFU (Top of Funnel Users) Approach to Business Intelligence

Posted on by

The TOFU (Top of Funnel Users) Approach to Business Intelligence

An interesting article in Forbes.com entitled, “Why Top Of The Funnel BI Will Drive The Next Wave Of Adoption”, written by Dan Woods, sparked some great conversations about bottom of the funnel users (20-30% wanting specific business information), and Top of Funnel Users (or TOFU) that want to interact with information in a personalized way and express their interests. I was fortunate to have Matt Milella, Director of Product Development for Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile Apps, and Jacques Vigeant, Product Strategy Director for Oracle Business Intelligence & Enterprise Performance Management, join me for a podcast to discuss their opinions about “The TOFU approach to business intelligence (BI)”.

Jacques explained that the article is basically about how BI has historically focused on what we refer to as the ‘business analyst’ or the ‘power user’. That’s the person in a company that has the unenviable task of analyzing data, finding trends, and synthesizing data into dashboards that he/she then shares with management. The common thinking, in BI companies, is that roughly 20% of the users prepare data that the ‘rest of us’ consume. There are many practical and technical reasons why BI started using this model 30 years ago, but the world of technology has come a long way since then. Today, the average user can do much more with much less help from IT.

Do you think that this article is interesting? Do you have any opinions? Thank you for reading. If you have any questions, send us a messageor leave a comment below.

Related articles

New Business Performance Management Solution from InsightSoftware.com Offers One System for Optimal Visibility

Posted on by

New Business Performance Management Solution from InsightSoftware.com Offers One System for Optimal Visibility

InsightSoftware.com, a leading provider of reporting, budgeting and reconciliation solutions for Oracle E-Business Suite and JD Edwards, today unveiled three new products designed to empower business users with the information they need to directly impact business performance, while also helping them realize a new level of value from their existing enterprise software systems. The products, announced today at COLLABORATE 2014, include two new additions to the award-winning InsightUnlimited product suite – InsightUnlimited Planning and InsightUnlimited Reporting for PeopleSoft – and a new business performance management solution called Hubble.

“New technology does not always equal business gain. Our goal with these new solutions is to help users gain a new level of value, not only from the data in their ERP, but also from their existing software solutions,” said Paul Yarwood, General Manager for InsightSoftware.com. “Data and technology is meant to empower – not slow you down. Hubble and our expanded InsightUnlimited solutions empower users with their information and their software so they can do their jobs better and directly impact business performance.”

With Hubble’s complete visibility, users can collaborate across multiple departments and through various levels of detail. Hubble also allows users to:

  1. Connect finance data from multiple sources into a single consolidated view;
  2. Easily search for metrics, discussions, workspaces and even people;
  3. Create an intuitive layer of organization, without the burden of traditional file structures, using innovative tagging capabilities;
  4. Share data with people inside and outside the organization without having to worry about permissions and privileges; and
  5. Make data powerful with infographic-style metrics that define goals and highlight important corporate milestones.

Thank you for reading, feel free to leave a comment if you have any opinions or send us a message.

Related articles

FusionOps Unveils LiveAnalytics for Supply Chain Data

Posted on by

FusionOps Unveils LiveAnalytics for Supply Chain Data

FusionOps, a supply chain analytics company that provides a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) application, has launched LiveAnalytics for supply chain data. LiveAnalytics uses images and live metrics to create infographics for supply chain processes and workflows.

The FusionOps application allows businesses to create new analytics from scratch. In addition, the application offers thousands of configurable analytics, metrics and tickers, FusionOps said.

LiveAnalytics leverages FusionOps’ interactive, root-cause analysis across the supply chain. FusionOps said LiveAnalytics users can visualize changes in their supply chains in real-time and evaluate data from all functional areas to become more efficient.

Some of LiveAnalytics’ features include:

  1. Alerts – When alerts are triggered, users are notified via email about supply chain events in real-time.
  2. Key performance indicator (KPI) dictionary – The new KPI dictionary explains pre-built and company-specific metrics.
  3. Personalized navigation – Users can access thousands of dashboards, KPIs and reports directly from LiveAnalytics’ main navigation and “Favorites” menus.

Thanks for reading this article. Welcome to leave a comment below or send us a message if you have any opinions.

 

Related articles

Sharpening strategic risk management

Posted on by

Sharpening strategic risk management

While conventional enterprise risk management (ERM) techniques have done a reasonable job in identifying and mitigating financial and operational risks, research shows that it is the management of strategic risk factors that will have the greatest impact on your ability to realise your strategic objectives. Bringing ERM into the forefront of strategic decision making and execution could thus give your business a decisive edge.

Strategic risks can be defined as the uncertainties and untapped opportunities embedded in your strategic intent and how well they are executed. As such, they are key matters for the board and impinge on the whole business, rather than just an isolated unit.

Strategic risk management is your organisation’s response to these uncertainties and opportunities. It involves a clear understanding of corporate strategy, the risks in adopting it and the risks in executing it. These risks may be triggered from inside or outside your organisation. Once they are understood, you can develop effective, integrated, strategic risk mitigation.

Far from holding back the business, strategic risk management is about augmenting strategic management and getting the full value from your strategy. In a typical instance, a conventional approach to setting and executing strategy might look at sales growth and service delivery. Rarely does it monitor the risks of a shortfall in demand.

Key questions for the board

  1. How well is my strategy actually defined?
  2. How broad are the risks that we are considering?
  3. What risk scenarios have we considered to test our plans?
  4. Have we mapped our risks to key performance and value measures?

Thank you for reading. If you have any opinions, please leave a comment below or send us a message.

Related articles

Box Partners With Roambi To Attack The BI Market

Posted on by

Box Partners With Roambi To Attack The BI Market

Box and Roambi just announced a partnership that is both old fashioned and empowering, and may be an accelerator for companies struggling to expand the use of data without creating a mess.

Spreadsheets are at the core of the Top of the Funnel BI challenge that companies all over the world have faced for decades. The challenge defined by TOFU BI (as I’ve discussed in “Why Top of the Funnel BI Will Drive the Next Wave of Adoption”) is how do you get everyone in the enterprise using data to maximum effect.

… the point of this partnership is to keep the wildly popular paradigm of self-service spreadsheets and add a delivery mechanism created for the modern, mobile world. Both Box and Roambi are well suited to solve parts of the problem and work together. Box acts as the repository that helps control the sprawl of hundreds or thousands of spreadsheets and makes them manageable. Roambi Analytics extracts data from spreadsheets and other sources and creates attractive dashboards or e-books (in the Roambi Flow product) that present data in an attractive way. …

If you have any opinions, leave it in the comment box or feel free to send us a message.

Related articles