Analytics and Things

Consumer marketing and communication  As part of any eCommerce business, interaction with the consumer is the foundation of a successful repeat customer.  If you don't communicate and interact with your customers in the right way, they'll not return.  Targeted /personalised marketing, abandoned basket emails, timely order confirmations, some of the many interactions a business will have with their customers. There are many platforms within the market which provide an enhanced consumer experience in relation to communication and marketing.  In this post, I'll be discussing how the integration of the Magento eCommerce platform and Adobe campaign (the consumer marketing platform) was achieved. What was the challenge?  To leverage the full potential of this platform, there was a requirement to enable the synchronisation of customer and transactional data between the eCommerce sites and Adobe Campaign, this allows automation of enhanced content emails to be triggered...

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...

Big Data - Is it?  Where ever you go these days, you hear the phrase 'Big Data'', in the news, on the web, at work and even in the pub. Every day the volume of data around us grows, as IoT (Internet of things) becomes the daily norm*, as we post more and more to social media, as streaming services grow, the volume of data around us grows at an exponential rate. It is predicted that there will be around 40 trillion gigabytes of data globally by the end of 2020, the estimated global data volume in 2010 was 1.2 trillion gigabytes, that grew to 2.8 trillion gigabytes by 2012.  The last two years has produced an estimated 90% of all data every created.  By 2025 it is predicted there will be an estimated 165 trillion gigabytes of data globally. So what is "Big Data"? Big data is a combination of structured, semi structured and unstructured data which is collected by organisations for advanced analytics, data mining and machine learning. What is structured, semi-structur...

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...