Data Data Data

Data is needed to drive all aspects of analytics, business intelligence, prescriptive analytics, and business optimization. Understanding your data needs is crucial to business success. Furthermore, in the century of Big Data, we collect more data and yet we do not have plans on how to process and digest the data to support our day-to-day operations or long-term vision.

Codarex data experience is to extract, cleanse, transform and load data from disparate sources into staging data marts, and ultimately into its final destination. Our customers have had major data structure changes and required support to port data in old databases, data files, Excel files into a new destination. These data issues arise from a multitude of reasons including:

  • Company mergers require aggregation of all data into a single data lake for reporting and analytics processes
  • Company can no longer use old software whether due to lack of support or the software product has been sunset. The old data is incredibly valuable but most likely, is not in a form readily digestible by new software systems
  • Companies acquire new software that has a more detailed data structure and the historical was collected differently but to keep the valuable data many errors that require cleansing to correct dat

These types of data migration projects can be extremely large with Petabytes of data to be processed. Codarex’s role is centered on data necessary for pricing, KPIs and reporting. Usually, separate data marts are created to process data so that advanced analytical methods and can use the underlying data that then drive downstream value to support sales, pricing and marketing departments.

Data Governance – Pricing Golden Record

If a company does not employ data governance policies, standards, strategies and processes then it will be difficult to ensure the data is secure, to create faith in downstream analytics, and to manage the never-ending data changes.

Data governance (DG) is the process of managing the availability, usability, integrity and security of the data in enterprise systems, based on internal data standards and policies that also control data usage. Effective data governance ensures that data is consistent and trustworthy and doesn’t get misused. It’s increasingly critical as organizations face new data privacy regulations and rely more and more on data analytics to help optimize operations and drive business decision-making. Codarex’s focus as a pricing company is on the overlap of data governance and business intelligence solutions, as well as, sales contract management systems. These draw in data and produce outputs that are written back into datamarts, reporting systems, ERP, and other downstream systems.

Codarex has also engaged Master Data Management exercises, or data rationalization projects. In general, out support is focused on product hierarchies, customer hierarchies, and geographical separations. Rationalizing a customer’s out-of-control product hierarchy involves understanding the performance of individuals and well as, secondary effects. This would including analyzing a product’s performance in terms of revenue and profit contribution, product complementarity effects, product cannibalization effects, bundle programs, and profit leakage. Companies rarely cleanse their product hierarchies, let alone, establish related product links. Hence there are hidden interactions with real revenue and profit implications. Without these linkage graphs, a price change in a single product could affect revenues from other sources.

In addition to, or as a corollary to product rationalization, we provide customer hierarchy rationalization. This can be in conjunction with a loyalty program review process. The customer – company relationship changes over time for various reasons such as competitive pressures, market pressures and behavioral pressures. To complicate matters, a complete view of a customer’s interaction with your entire product line is required. This can become complicated quickly when you consider Global Accounts, Key Accounts, Customer Tier accounts and coupled to geographical delineations. A global account customer is a key profit center for a product family in EMEA but not SA.

Agile Solution Delivery

Codarex fully supports Agile methodologies. We employ modified versions of Scrum and Lean Software Development. The concepts of scrum Agile methodology was first proposed by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka HBR article, ‘The New New Product Development Game’. The scrum was borrowed from their rugby analogy. The general principles of Agile Development transfer nicely into pricing and sales analytics engagements. The methods are people-focused, and results-focused innovation continuously, incrementally and spirally while trying to minimize risk of delivering results with low user adoption. Agile methodologies are centered around adaptive planning, self-organization, constant evaluations, and short delivery times. It’s flexible, fast, and aims for continuous improvements in quality which is perfect for short engagements with highly technical deliveries. We cannot emphasize the importance of the feedback from many touch points with stakeholders.

Engagement Philosophy

Codarex espouses the benefits of documentation. Every engagement will have a Agile Solution Delivery project plan. Agile project plans are different from standard serial project plans. The plan is constantly changing as we work though scrum blocks. The start of any engagement should have a Business Requirements Document (BRD) to establish the top 3 goals of the project. Forcing a team to focus on the business issues early will help cement their purpose throughout the engagement. Documentation helps formulize hand-waving arguments, and furthermore the BRD will help create a Statement of Work for the project with clearly defined project objectives and deliverables.

Our engagements typically require data for analysis. This could be historical transactions, master data dimensions, contract data, inventory data and other elements to support the pricing activity. The earlier this process begins the better. This is the first scrum for any project. Data elements will need to be identified, data systems determined, and followed by requesting proper IT resources to pull the data. Typically, pull a small set of data for review and signoff. Then start the process to retrieve historical data. Data governance processes may require additional supporting documentation for the data request.

Keep in mind, that the data requirements can continuously change but incrementally. As insights are gathered, gaps will become apparent. This may require an additional data request, which would simply be another iteration of the data scrum.

Codarex produces a Business Development Document to document what we have provided. The BDD is the customer’s reference for future reference. If we are providing any analytics, then a description of the mathematical models implemented , the supporting data and its sources, and how the results are publish would be in this document. It serves two purposes: usually a deliverable in the SOW; the customer can use to train new users. This documentation is especially important with complex outputs.

Analytics Overlay

Analytics Experience – Varied and Deep

Although our focus is primarily in pricing and sales contract negotiation, this covers a surprising wide array of mathematical techniques. Due to our extensive experience in statistics, operation research, mathematical modeling, machine learning and AI, Codarex engagements have solving many different business problems. Our outputs are digested and published in other corporate systems such as sales, ERP and SCM software. We have provided pricing solutions for ERP system such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Azure.

Technology

Codarex talent has been providing statistical, optimization, and other data science modeling methods for the last 20 years. We have delivered solutions in Excel, Access, SQL Server stack, Matlab executables, R, SAS, and these days, Python and Jupyter Notebooks. Our more complex solutions may be coded in Java, C, C++ and C# languages. We are strong proponents of open source tools, especially if they accomplish the task. For example, IBM CPLEX is a fantastic optimization model solver for large problems, but the cost may be prohibitive for a company or department. So we would present a solution that uses an open source solver, such as COIN-OR, as an alternate path. There are many methods to solve a problem, and we balance cost with processing output, to find the best solution for our customers.

We have supported many business intelligence and dashboard projects. Fundamentally, there has been incredible convergence in the business intelligence publishing space. So there is not much difference between initializing a report in Microsoft Power BI, IBM, SAS, Salesforce, Tableau, Qlik, TIBCO, and even Pentaho CE. The real separation between business intelligence software is how they power analytics and Excel integration. Excel is still a requirement even with BI software. The reason is that, as great as BI software is, they have limitations and data will be pulled from the system to be analyzed in Excel, R, Jupyter, Matlab, Octave or another analytically powered system. Fortunately, many BI platforms have extended their systems to allow integrations with outside solutions. For example, R code and Python code can be run natively on Microsoft Power BI.

Pricing Analytics

Codarex resources are especially powerful for solving large scale pricing problems. Large problems with large datasets introduce extra issues to manage. Big Data is old news now. Most companies collect store large swaths of data. Modeling in Big Data uses different tools sets to manage CPU requirements, solution time, and database structures. However, the process fundamentally the same to solve smaller problems. The difference lies in the tools used.

Some areas of pricing support that Codarex have provided, include:

  • Segmentation for pricing and marketing
  • Price List optimization
    • annual and other frequency
  • Pricing programs
    • Subscription pricing
    • promotional pricing
    • bundled product pricing
    • specialty vs commodity price separation
  • Discount Matrix structures across important dimensions
  • Loyalty programs
    • Initial creation
    • Realignment
    • Alliance alignment
  • Product Pricing analyses support
    • New product introduction – Blue Ocean, Greenfield

As corporations drive productivity increases, resources become strained and constrained. In pricing, this typically impacts the amount of time pricing analysts and business analysts can devote to requesting or pulling data, manipulating the data into useful forms, running analytics and if possible executing price optimization. Your pricing analysts and business analysts have extensive market, product and customer expertise. Our service offerings are designed to work in concert with your teams. Our talent embeds in your teams, and extends your team’s abilities because our services are a combination of pricing expertise and analytics expertise. When your team’s time demands peak, you can offload some of the analytical and pricing functions, thereby, freeing your teams to focus on their more important functions.

Contact us to discuss your business issues, and how we can provide the resources to solve your problems on time, on budget, with minimal risk.