Analytics and Things

Globalising Electronic Point of Sale data. With everything going on in  the world and the impact on the retail sector in particular, the importance of easy access to timely data is ever more important than ever. As a business, the we have access to a trove of Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) data from many of its retailers, along with wider data sets of market performance of competitors. Using Alteryx, they've been able to visualise data to provide an enhanced view of their operations at a global level, while adding increased visibility and access across the entire organisation.  The Challenge As a consumer packaged goods manufacturer, data is provided from retailers in relation to sales data from stores (EPOS). We receive EPOS data from over 50 retailers, across three regions (EMEA, US and APAC).  That's data for over 4500 stores global, resulting in hundreds of thousands of new rows of data on a weekly basis. Each retailer provides data in different formats. This results...

Reading unstructured data from Microsoft Word Many businesses have data which is held in an unstructured format within Microsoft Word, product marketing data, such as descriptions, key features, etc.. which is used on retailer websites.  This ‘information’ is generic and not linked to a specific, tangible structured data in any way..   As an example, if we wanted to link the marketing description, which is held in a separate word document for each of our products, to a specific product SKU to use in reporting or to load in to a new system, this would have to be done manually, which is massively inefficient and time consuming. A solution Using Alteryx, I addressed the challenge through utalising the Python tool and a little Python scripting  to read a list of Word documents from a directory.  This was built out in to a custom macro for reusability. Then for each file, read the content, identify each individual line of text and build a ‘list’. This list is then tr...

What do data analytics, the outdoors, cool tech and navigation have in common?  They are all things I'm pretty passionate about, so being a bit of a data geek, I brought them all together. I spend a lot of time out doors, walking our mad Chocolate Lab (Bobby), Kayaking the lakes, rivers and beautiful coastline of the North of England, Stand up paddle boarding or supporting mass participation water sports events as a life guard. Through all these activities, I like to track distance and other stats via my Garmin watches. (Yes, I have more than one, though usually only wear one at a time), so that I can compare the same or similar activities. The activities shown here take place in the Lake District, in the North West of England.  One of my favorite locations anywhere in the world. A landscape of beautiful green mountains, large (for the UK) lakes and flowing rivers. Lake Windermere is the largest lake in England, one of 16 in the Lake District.  A common pub quiz question ...

Welcome to Analytics and Things! A blog has long been something I've considered but it's always been 'I wouldn't have time' or 'would anyone actually read it? other than maybe me and my family.'  Well no more, it's time to get on with it. So over the coming weeks, months I will be looking to share with you my thoughts and experiences on analytics and things.   The analytics (hopefully) will be obvious to you all, this will be focused on the my experiences,  the technologies I use in my daily work life and some I don't but interest me.  I'll be sharing articles and resources which I find interesting or useful. The things bit, on the other hand, well who knows what that may hold.  I intend to mix it up a little and share some of the other passions of mine with you, this could be kayaking, life saving / water safety or just about anything else which grabs my attention. A bit about me. For those who know me, feel free to skip to the end now. For thos...