datagrains : a MeghaServe.com blog : SaaS Solutions and BI Consulting

Shopper step analysis

2011-05-19T00:49:00.000-07:00

With every square feet of a retail space becoming expensive these days, retailer is continuously on lookout of new ways to optimize floorspace and enhance shopper experience.
How many steps a shopper has to take prior to finding the item?, how many times he goes back n forth? which is the most foot printed place?, are some of the key questions analysts need to answer to yield to optimized placements of items and promotions.
Large retailers already do market basket analysis and placement predictions using data collected in POS. Now using the cart movement on retail floor provides another dimension. Following is a grid showing sample shopper cart movement data.

On the left side are Cart ID and shopper's moving steps (Stops a shopper takes. Every stop is recorded by isle RFID sensors assuming carts are fixed with RFID tags). Columns in the grid show sections in retail shop, these are marked with point numbers. i.e in a ideal case, shopper navigates like point 1 --> point 2 --> .. point 10. Grid cells show sum of sales made(recorded at POS).
Following is a visual showing the heatmap of sales with customer's navigation behaviour.

Blank cells with grey color are sections where shoppers visited and did not make any purchase. Same visualization can be embedded over a shopfloor graphic to show navigation behaviors.

Hope this post helped in tinkering some new ideas on retail analysis using your BI solution.

Enjoy!

www.meghaserve.com

Need of BI dashboard review service

2011-05-10T02:16:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone is very excited to spin BI lingo these days. We use best/largest/home-made/cloud-based/next-gen BI etc. But it is sad to see many just don't implement pieces with larger business objectives in mind.
Most of the BI projects fail because they just go with out-of-box templates for reports/dashboards and try to meet information needs to make those come alive.

We found that there is requirement for reviewing BI communication work in most small/large corporates today. Why not consultants who are implementing BI technology to review the reports and dashboards then?.
It is possible, if you find experienced BI professional who has worked on technology agnostic solutions. But mostly project management demand on the ground implementors more than these experts. Still it is wise to get help of such people who see projects from holistic point of view.

See, BI means no magic. It requires detailed planning in every stage from data integration, organization to data communication to end users.

So, we gave birth to this idea of remote dashboard reviews. http://meghaserve.com/BIreviewchallenge.html
Our idea is to provide express delivery of reviews & suggestions on dashboards from any part of the world without compromising quality. Ultimately it is beauty of data which should be shown and understood clearly.

Here is a pair of inverted pyramids which represents the dashboard usage and their importance in corporate life..

Nothing new here, however our intention here is to show you the importance of dashboards. Both executives and end users may use various aspects of BI depending on the nature of work they are performing.

With MeghaServe dashboard review service, we intend to review the objectives and match it with dashboard components/layouts. We then send technology agnostic review comments and if viable, modified version of dashboard layouts. We would do this as specialized service delivered in quick parcels. This method ensures that our customer receives value and enables us to measure our success faster.

Here is snapshot of how our process works..

Towards your success
MeghaServe BI Team

You see exactly what is shown to you! But how information should be shown to you?!

2011-05-07T00:21:00.000-07:00

As we navigate through clutter of huge information, lesser and lesser time is at our disposal to understand it. We tend to rely on what is easily seen and rely on that information for decision making. Now you see that quality of what has been shown to you as of utmost importance to you. As most of the organizations rely on technical consultants working on dashboards/report developments following equation may hold good..

Quality and experience of BI consultant == Quality of information shown to you

Quality of information shown to you == Quality of information seen by you

Now every leader sees the same thing, but interprets it differently. Job of a dashboard is to provide avenues to those new explorations with quick insights. BI practitioners should keep user focused on business objectives. Most of the time people who implement these BI visuals don;t understand the deep objective of the work being done.

Lets take a look at a part of BI dashboard snapshot of a travel company represented in two formats.

First form is classical pie chart. second one is horizontal bars.

Which one aided you to compare best?!

If you get access to book on Information Dashboards by Stephen Few, do read it, you will benefit a lot. Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

MeghaServe ACM: map visualization feature for Ad Campaign analysis

2011-03-11T00:44:00.000-08:00

There are always better ways to visualize complex nature of Ad Campaign operations. In this video, we show you map analysis feature available in meghaserve ACM. This feature will help you to get deeper insights into ad campaigns take right actions.

for more details and free trial, please visit www.meghaserve.com

How Marketing Ad Campaigns can benefit from google map clustering and coverage radius overlays..

2011-01-24T00:11:00.000-08:00

Ad Campaign Management involves lot of operational data originating from various agencies/sources like Market Researchers, Media buyers and Media Networks. Most of the data pertaining to campaigns are associated with certain demographics and geographies. Without proper visualization tools, wealth of information would be soon buried and opportunity to build intelligence is lost.

Advent in technology today allows us to optimize campaign operations and increase visibility provided we collect/ask for certain details from agencies along with their standard media reports. Multiple visualizations using maps enable us to quickly differentiate information with techniques like heat-maps, clustering and coverage radius overlays. While heat-maps overlays provide information density of critical measures over map area, clustering and radius overlays provide details on media specifics.

We will use 'meghaserve ACM' - Map Analysis feature to explain benefits of clustering and radius coverage.

Clustering visualization:

Take an example of Ad campaign targeted at a specific geographic area like India. The screen-shot on the right shows various Ad runs over planned media spread across the area.
Clustering allows to see large amount of data on the map with count of media shown. In this example, there are 2 media in the western region and 8 media in southern region on which Ads are running.
These clusters have dynamic responses, i.e if you zoom, map will start displaying more specific details on map.

Coverage Radius visualization:

This is a another alternative to view Ad media coverage over the map. On left side are two snaps showing radius of outdoor media and newsprint media planned for the campaigns. Application provides great value for Brand Campaign managers during operations and analysis.
With configurable parameters like radius and colors, analysis takes new dimension and greater value.

To check other value added features of 'meghaserve ACM' app, please visit
http://meghaserve.com/ACMTraxFeatures.html

Thank you

Linkedin Poll: Where does an Advertiser spend majority of his time during Ad Campaigns?

2011-01-19T22:02:00.000-08:00

Chart type and scale selection for BI dashboards

2010-12-15T00:28:00.000-08:00

In this blog we are going over two of chart selection techniques for dashboard and reporting. First one is about scale selection and second one is about category measure comparison over two time ranges.

When designing dashboards, type of charts and scaling to be used are critical in quickly communicating information.

Here is first example:
Requirement is to compare %ge of sales of various products over 3year span.
Now since data is continuous we are selecting line chart with product as series. X axis for years and Y for %ge as values. One may even show the results in bar charts in this specific case.

Now check spread of sales value which range from 1% to 80% to be represented on the chart. If we select linear scaling, small numbers would get hidden amongst larger values. So there are two ways to communicate on linear scale.
1. have lower values hard to see, just like chart on the right side (who cares!)
2. devide charts in multiple sections like max sales less than 10% over 3 year span and show these sections separately.

Another way is to communicate with log scale as shown in left part of the picture. Chose this scale bit carefully as it should not be mixed with linear scaling charts and should standout well.. Observe that the lower section of the data points have been differentiated well with log scaled chart.

Other point we wanted to discuss in this blog was about optimizing space on the dashboard with right chart usage. For this example we will use following table showing two time segments for sales% comparison.

Picture here shows a less efficient way of displaying the comparison with pie chart. I am wondering why most business folks prefer this type of comparison. Anyways, from design point it looks so inefficient and time consuming/strenuous (for your eyes) for dashboard type communication.

Here is same data represented as one bar chart. There are two things you will accomplish: 1. Chart is less space consuming 2. You have easy comparison of measures arranged side by side.

Pie charts have got certain limitation, and should be used only for certain tasks. It is less efficient to use them for set comparisons.

Hope this was helpful. You may find other post on Pie chart interesting too..

All the best

What happens when advertisers change Ad Agencies?

2010-12-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

Recent news article in Business Standard showed advertiser's developing trend in changing ad agencies.

It is common to have multiple ad agencies for a big spender.Ad agencies do accomplish great deal of work for brand promotions and have become vital part in success. Ad agencies, especially media agencies accumulates wealth of information about campaign performance and spend. Losing them might result in missing link of that wealth.

Smart advertisers would collect all relevant data points on a regular basis in the form of offline reports like excel reports or from online portal access to ad agency's analytics. If there are multiple brands and agencies or when campaigns tend to be aggressive in nature, there are opportunities to lose insights in some of the spend data/ media allocations. Without proper systems in place to collect information and present them at right-time, it is almost a mess.

Most in ad industry agree with John Wanamaker's quote:

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half."

Agreed. But intelligent systems and disciplined practice can yield much more ROI for campaign spend. Mainly because such systems will
1. eliminate numerous hours/days of efforts one spends on validations and reporting.
2. help in standardizing reporting from across agencies and
3. overtime builds an in-house intelligence power which can be used for future campaigns and also integrate it with Enterprise Data Warehouses for advanced Business Intelligence

So don't lose those valuable insights, have complete control over the Ad Campaigns.

Kiran Padiyar
www.meghaserve.com
explore possibilities...

Spend on forward-looking insights

2010-12-06T22:54:00.000-08:00

In a recent Economic Times interview Mr. S Sthanunathan Global VP (marketing strategy and insights) Coca Cola had following remarks on current market research

"Almost 80% of the budget is spent on rear-view research and explaining the past.But is there any point looking at the past and doing what you always did incrementally better We need to spend at least 50% of research budget on forward-looking insights."

As a BI practitioner I consider it as a very valid point which current BI implementations rarely consider. The source of information today in any organization are data they generate, either by transactions(sales, marketing ...) or surveys etc. But what about the wealth of first hand information consumers are putting on the web?. Is there a system to mine that info and integrate with internal streams?

I recently had an experience at grocery section of a supermarket. A representative from Colgate who was standing near the oral care department, came to us, introduced himself and asked a survey question "which toothpaste are we using? and do we have any sensitive teeth problems?". Consumer surveys like these are often intrusive, just putting the consumers on guard. But what if Colgate had non intrusive sensors on social media sites like twitter, facebook, blogs etc. They would be receiving high volume of information without having to go to consumers. There is a need to have non-intrusive probe not just to listen to comments on web but derive corporate intelligence upfront. For forward looking marketers it can prove to be a strong competitive edge.

Here is a schematic showing the missing piece of puzzle! Ideas, suggestions, improvements, likings, feelings are in conversation 24*7. Connecting these insights to corporate mainstream BI initiative will really open up avenues for forward-looking insights..

MeghaServe ACM introduction video on youtube

2010-12-04T04:51:00.000-08:00

Business Intelligence in Hospitality sector

2010-11-23T02:35:00.000-08:00

I had a recent experience in consulting a regional hotel chain for their Business Intelligence initiative. This blog post is afterthought of that exercise.

Ever increasing competition and overall technological advances has raised today's
customer's expectations. Even before calling the reservation desk of a hotel, customer is engaged in planning via various channels like Internet portals, social networks and other traditional methods as well. So when Customer makes the reservations, he/she will have set of expectations from the hotels. Hoteliers very well understand the importance of meeting/exceeding guest's expectations as a fundamental part of hospitality business.

So is the case for BI with key problems they face like, what attracts new customers and importantly how to retain them and increase their value over life to the hotel.

Implementation of BI systems can enhance this customer experience and maximize operational performance.
We can easily identify these two aspects of BI in hospitality business as
1. Customer centric analysis and promotions
2. Hotel operational performance management

Following picture represents a typical hotel scenario and where the information gathering starts even prior to guest reserves a room. As mentioned above leads are getting sophisticated, they check about the hotels on various parameters like social ratings, customer referrals, proximity to place of interest, prices etc. All BI software would be able to do is to bring new insights on the data available. So quality along with quantity of data about the customer and operations is foundation element of BI analytics here.

Customer analysis works best when reservation system collects as much information as possible from the guests like

· Age,
· Gender
· Visiting purpose - corporate/holiday
· Life style/Income group
· Profession
· Address

· Type of room
· Days of stay
· Special requests etc
These when collected over a period, we can try to correlate to his/her
buying pattern and feedback to the processes to improvise the services. Also it helps in determining customer's life time value for the hotel.

For operational performance analysis, one has to collect some basic information like
· Lead sources
· Promotional responses
· Occupancy rates
· Commissions paid to agents
· Satisfaction surveys
· Room Service details : like laundry, Cleaning and other expenses etc

All these are not automatically discovered and implemented by any system. There has to be a process and system to collect information, analysts to check on the pattern and system to provide continuous feedback to the teams. BI system implementation aims at providing actionable insights using the data captured.

Business Intelligence is a evolving system. Any organization will undergo a series of evolution stages or maturity levels when it seeks to derive value out of BI
implementation. To have holistic view of the business, all the data needs to be integrated and stored at a central Data Warehouse for integrated analytics. Else the mining/exploration would have to be done in silos leaving hidden insights undiscovered.

A high-level BI system in an enterprise would look like as following.

As you can see in the diagram, there are four stages involved. First one is existing software systems also called as operational support systems. In Hotels, these are systems like Reservations, Accounting, Room Servicing or CRM. All these discrete data would then be integrated, transformed and loaded to central repository like Data Warehouse. Once data is stored in a Data Warehouse, it becomes easy to access for further analysis and reporting. Data Warehouse is structured differently than operational systems and historically maintained.

Steps Recommended for BI initiative
1. Study existing systems
2. Analyze Key Performance measures management is focusing on
3. Architect/Design a BI system
4. Select tools for Data Warehousing, Data Integration and Visualization/Analysis

5. Implement the system
6. Prepare business to incorporate Continuous Improvements

Here is a sample Hospitality dashboard.

Tell us know what do you think!

MeghaServe.com BI Team

MeghaServe.com customer's voice: "our costs are not prohibitive and support costs are very reasonable"

2010-11-22T01:21:00.000-08:00

Following are words which came in today from VWF Industries leadership for our work on strategic IT consulting.

"Your report on our IT infrastructure needs and futureproofing it was very pragmatic. Your recommendation on the use of cloud computing and moving some our applications into the open source arena meant that our costs are not prohibitive and support costs are very reasonable. As a non-IT medium sized company, this approach made a lot of sense for us."

- Mr. Ajith Pai, JMD, VWF Industries Ltd. Mysore, India

http://www.vwfindustries.com/

We had studied existing IT systems, pain-points, corporate goals of VWF to comeup with detailed IT strategy report. As a result, VWF has already started moving some apps to cloud in phases.
Read my "Cloud Computing: making a switch" blog to get a glance on why you need to check cloud apps for your business.

MeghaServe Technologies helps businesses to reduce IT cost and increase business performance by providing tool agnostic consulting. Learn more about our consulting services at http://meghaserve.com/services.html

Kiran Padiyar
www.meghaserve.com

Challenge No 1 for Datawarehousing projects

2010-11-21T21:52:00.000-08:00

After leadership decides on an initiative for Data Warehousing, there are lots of important key steps to be taken even prior to starting the actual work. Other than infrastructure planning, information system coverage and objectives, it is estimation of the actual work to be performed. From my experience working with large financial and insurance sector corporates, it is the Data Integration which will be bottleneck almost always.

Let us be honest, one can easily estimate(well relatively) # of machines required, # of software licenses required, # of hours required to build reports, and often # of hours for data modeling. When it comes to Data Integration, the illusion is movement of data from point A to point B. However the challenge is not A and B, it is in between!.
Years worth of data health of which god only knows, mostly like carrying rubbish to a central pod and expecting crystal clear information at the end.Ofcourse, estimations are done considering some tolerance of 10 to 20% from ideal scenario! ha ha.. that is it.

Be cautious, its like guessing the depth of murky waters at sea without any tools to measure. In case of Data Integration, the problem is not knowing what to do with source of information when it tends be having variations in patterns. Or just not knowing how many patterns would be discovered!

Most successful implementations follow data profiling route even before estimating the integration efforts. Data profiling although will not perform the magic, will provide some insights into complexity which we are getting into. So this technique will bring down cost overruns dramatically. And still majority of corporates start projects without any profiling done only to encounter a death spiral. A death spiral is where developers put quick fix transformations and make a route to destination. No wonder why then leadership always worries about moving targets and burned out developers in such projects.

Take the first step right, concur the Challenge No1. which is to understand complexity of Data involved using proper Data Profiling techniques.

Kiran Padiyar
MeghaServe.com

Introduction video for MeghaServe ACM solution

2010-11-16T05:57:00.000-08:00

Today we released our introduction video for MeghaServe ACM solution. It was a long time wish since we had started working on the solution. Hoping that the video communicates to the audiences the message we wanted to convey. Check out Video Link

The End Of Advertising- on slideshare.net by IBM

2010-10-06T21:58:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Very interesting research paper. As the Ads get more and more personalized mass media consumption would slowly narrow down for better reach.

The End Of Advertising By IBM

View more presentations from Brian Tiong.

'Sales and General Expenses' and impact on consumer price - Why you should tightly control Ad Campaigns

2010-08-12T05:27:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered how much a company spends on Ads and Marketing?. I did my own little research recently using publicly available financial data of listed companies and with help of some expert articles on web.
Following is a random sample of Indian companies with their Net Sales and SGA from PL statements (I am not claiming accuracy of the data, this is just for information purpose).

		Income/				15.00%
Sector	Company	Netsales(Cr.)	SGA Expense(Cr.)	%ge of Sales	report month/year	Apprx Ad Spend(Cr.)
personal care	HUL	17769	3737	21.03%	mar2010	560.55
telecom	Reliance	15086	3673	24.35%	Mar 2009	550.95
Telecom	Bharti airtel	35600	2422	6.80%	Mar 2010	363.3
Airlines	Jet Airways	11571	1843	15.93%	MAr 2009	276.45
Cement	ACC	8021	1658	20.67%	Dec 2009	248.7
Cement	Ultratech	7042	1653	23.47%	MArch 2010	247.95
telecom	Idea	9857	1622	16.46%	Mar 2010	243.3
Auto	M&M	18516	1439	7.77%	Mar 2010	215.85
Cement	Ambuja	7083	1432	20.22%	Dec 2009	214.8
Paints	Asian Paints	5367	1119	20.85%	March 2010	167.85
Airlines	Kingfisher	5269	1062	20.16%	MAr 2009	159.3
Food processing	nestle	5141	839	16.32%	Dec 2009	125.85
Auto	Maruti Suzuki	20729	751	3.62%	Mar 2009	112.65
Auto	Hero Honda	12325	669	5.43%	Mar 2009	100.35

These are all yearly data points. Final column above is average spend (assumption) a company does in Advertisement Campaigns. Also FYI $1M ~= INR 4.7 Cr

My point of analysis was to understand how much these biggies are spending on Advertisements yearly. In my sample list Hindusthan Unilever topped with a spending of 560Cr. (Again this is not actual figure, but based assumption % of SGA). This is huge amount involving large teams of Marketing department collaborating with Agencies and other parties to get campaigns running. Even a 1% operational efficiency increase or save of cost means around INR 5.6 Cr profit for this company.
In the world with high competition and increasing raw material costs, consumers are becoming more and more choosy. How do you get best impact with less spend does matter a lot.

Costing is more or less has following equation
[Raw materials + Process( power & people) ] --> [Product] + [Sales+Marketing] -->[Base cost]+[Margin]-->[Salesprice]+[Distribution Cost (Transportation & Margins)] = {Consumer Price}

So if i buy a product for INR100 in market following would be price composition >
INR 20 for distribution+ INR 14.4 as Margin, INR 15.74 for Sales expense, Processing INR 10.5 and Raw materials INR 39.36.

Composition may vary depending on the industry sector and other parameters, but it may be sufficient to throw some lights on the pricing.

At MeghaServe Technologies our Ad Campaign Management Solution is geared towards increasing operational efficiency and gaining visibility of campaigns. It improves business's ability to analyze key measures campaigns after campaigns, agency after agencies and improve over all brand bottom line. Even if it means 1% its good.

Kiran Padiyar
www.meghaserve.com

Points to remember while doing Ad-hoc Analysis with spreadsheets in BI Enterprise

2010-08-11T03:08:00.000-07:00

In my previous blog entry, I mentioned about unstoppable urge of Analysts to use Excel spreadsheets for some analysis purposes. Very important factor there was using the controlled data for this analysis. Now, if you are an analyst and you are constrained with implemented BI system here are few things to make your life bit comfortable.

1. Use standard BI reporting/analysis tools for doing preliminary filtering of your data stored in Enterprise Datawarehouse
2. Check if there is an add-on to spreadsheet(excel/open office etc) from BI tool
3. Export filtered data from BI system to spreadsheet and start playing with it
4. Remember to tag spreadsheet with key information for BI data filtering like 'As of Date' and filter criteria used
5. Do not delete/alter any data originally exported from BI tool in spreadsheet, refer that data using formulas (this makes your checks and balance easy)
6. Use spreadsheets only for features not supported by your BI tools like 'What if' analysis, one off formula calculations etc.

Communicate your hardships to IT leaders, but adhere to IT data governance and security rules all the times.

Why Analysts love using Excel so much? : do better job at provisioning data instead.

2010-08-07T07:40:00.000-07:00

Based on my comments on linkedin TDWI group discussion "Self Service BI: Balancing Ad Hoc with Tailored Delivery to Achieve Widespread Adoption of BI"

In my experience with BI implementations, I have observed that however hard IT tries for adoption of the BI Systems, users mostly revert back to dearest spreadsheets for their ad-hoc analysis work. This happens mainly because human analytical abilities are not systematic, rather its fluid and can lead anywhere. BI systems are not so fluid enough. So its the ability to do what-if and on the fly formulas etc that gives analyst more power than the single version of truth stored in a complex system.

Now as a BI Practitioners in IT its our duty to push the usage of uniform data, however the delivery of it to the user group should be simple enough. Like guidelines on how and where to search for right data in enterprise, report templates in BI systems as well as in spreadsheets, developing BI connectors within spreadsheets etc.

Self Service only becomes successful if the system has loosely controlled process for Analysis/visualization, But tightly controlled and easy to access source of data.

What this ultimately mean to IT?. a best Architecture that supports standard organizational reporting and provisioning single version of truth to various other channels for self-service analysis/reporting etc for strategic and tactical decision making. There is no wonder then why almost all the BI majors have developed Excel connectors and plugins. Such usage of central Data Warehouse also promotes to Data as a Service in organizations.

So don't hold neck of Analysts for trying Excel, but see how to improve provisioning of controlled data to empower their fluid analytical thought processes.

meghaserve.com BI Team

Influential factors for deciding to do business with a company (from TOI dtd 07/07/10)

2010-07-07T09:57:00.000-07:00

Today's Times of India newspaper visual on 'Influencing factors in deciding business with a company' (Study of Indian market) got my attention because of two subjects which i am very much into nowadays. 1. Media Marketing 2. Business Intelligence (especially visual representation).

Let me take them one by one.
Media Marketing Research
The visual shown on the paper is expected to convey influence with color coding of Orange for 'Very important' and Light blue for 'Somewhat important'. Most people voted Personal experience as Very important in making decisions followed by Brand reputation.
Now you know personal experience is based on past service + experience during the shopping. This is where loyalty is built.
Second comes Brand, which per me is image built over time based on personal experiences and how company projects itself.
These two clearly stands out of rest of the categories.
Interestingly the ratio turns around for other influencers, where more people feel that recommendations, Media, and Social media 'Somewhat important'. There might be more intelligent analysis than this from marketing perspective, I leave that to marketing experts..

Now for the second part of my interest: Business Intelligence - Visual representation
Did you see that paper clipping had a third category shown in black. At first i had a problem in connecting it with other two categories i.e Very and Somewhat. It is to show total influence along with individual influences. In this process one particular aspect of visual representation is missed out and that is size of those square colored boxes. Their equal sizes does not visually communicate quantitative importance. Secondly, black box should have represented on different level if at all it was required.

On right is what i consider better visual for such communication. We could add a label on right of each measure series showing totals if necessary.

So,don't just see. look and learn

Enjoy!

MeghaServe.com BI Team

Campaign Hierarchy and Advertisement Management

2010-06-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

Campaigns are normally managed as hierarchies. Like in following case for a brand activation, there may be various channels to generate awareness and finally bring leads in. Traditional Advertisement is one of the channel which is being used very widely along with other trending channels like Internet social media.
Its relatively easy to integrate effectiveness of Internet campaigns as most of the data is generated and managed on internet itself. Whereas for traditional media like Newsprint, TV, Radio, OOH there is no much direct mechanism to measure the outcome.
Challenge 1: Plan effective medium for geographies and demographics in focus
Challenge 2: Monitor spending on each of the medium and then do analysis on effectiveness for future campaigns
Challenge 3: Manage relations with Ad agencies and Media Owners for better accountability and control

(Please click on on above image for bigger size)
In most of the CRMs one can enter high level measures like expected revenues, budgeted cost, actual cost of campaigns etc. However to collect details on individual medium operations like which creative has been shown, which TV channels are costing more or which OOH locations are generating buzz for the campaigns are difficult or it requires customizations. Usually these data are spread across Ad agencies, Monitoring agencies and Research teams.
As Ad spend all over the world is considerably high percentage of the product cost, getting easy access to all these data at one place is per me very important success factor.

Thank you

Data Crunching is a speciality - Enterprise Story Tellers (EST)

2010-06-09T09:33:00.000-07:00

In large businesses nowadays you will find a new kind of headache. Understanding the data, lot of them!.
Just like your books and other things you purchase overtime, which becomes organizing nightmare one day. Enterprises keep on accumulating mammoth amounts of data and when it comes to projects initiatives like Data Warehousing, its not about technology that most bother. Its what to move and what not. The debate goes on and when in doubt all is moved!

Now this mammoth requires special attention and making sense is really a specialty business. Although most of the consulting companies nowadays will have data warehousing as their expertise, the real guys differentiate a lot with passion they have and proven teams.

Data Crunching is a specialty skill and it requires:

Openness to possibilities
Analytical ability
Patience
Expert background of querying databases
Visual thinking
Visual Communication

and why you require a Data Cruncher (Data Analyst is a better sounding term right!)?

I quote them as Enterprise Story Tellers(EST), they crunch data, analyze and tell you interesting things which you should know. You know what most of the selfservice dashboards, reports still a great and must tool for routine works, but when it comes to bringing life to certain findings its these ESTs. Without them its like a movie without sound track! May still work with different interpretations.

I will leave you with this very interesting video from TED. Thank you.

ERP Dashboard analysis

2010-06-04T23:50:00.000-07:00

Recently i happened to visit a ERP site and kept wondering why certain dashboards (as posted on their website) are that way. Keeping 'Information Dashboard Design' principles in mind, we can see lots of improvements to be done to these dashboards.

I feel these vendor teams do not have exposure to right mechanisms to display information or they are constrained by technology used in the application.
Once you study and start applying correct design principles, Charts like car speedometers, oil level monitor etc. would just become redundant and eye strains.

There are many improvement areas in following dashboards, starting with
1. Chart type selection: Instead of space consuming meters, they should have used bullet charts.
2.Measures do not show references immediately. like Scrap cost as a % of production cost. Definitely its a key measure, but do you see how much 4.9% means?. Displaying the Production cost and Scrap cost along with the visual helps.
Many more in the improvement list right? - Spot them yourself.

For a colorful sales presentation these dashboards help, however for daily checking and making sense without effort?!.

Social Networking - The Future of Business

2010-05-31T22:53:00.000-07:00

Traditional way of doing business with employees working in silo teams is changing as internet revolutions like social networking has started influencing enterprise software. Its exciting to see adoption pioneer Salesforce.com embracing and including social networking in enterprise software. You know why this is exciting?!, now from within the application users can not only listen to walls of public sites like twitter and facebook, but also its like listening to walls within enterprise.
Check following interview at CNBC with Salesforce's Marc Benioff..

Now it gets even better at MeghaServe.com, our Media Campaign Management software - OOHTrax naturally inherits this cloud behavior as its 100% native to force.com. Which means, collaboration within the app becomes effortless. Stickiness of the app grows a lot, which in turn improves communication and capturing of corporate knowledge base == Employee Productivity gains.

So you see cloud is not just about saving cost, its also about bringing innovations to practice at speeds which we could never have achieved with traditional ways.

Cloud Computing : making a switch

2010-04-29T01:12:00.000-07:00

There is lot of unknown when selecting right solution for business requirements. Majority of the time people are used to the traditional big buck installations, planning hardware/software and team formations for implementation and then project the cost for next X years.
In Cloud, when a business solution is provisioned, most of these tasks get eliminated. One has to change perception from IT spend to business innovations. Users naturally subscribe to the best out in the marketplace for a great price again with enterprise quality services.

Applications built on top of platforms like force.com inherits all the foundation blocks like security, scaling, responsiveness etc. With great degree of transparency of operational statistics of cloud platforms like salesforce.com, business and IT departments now just have to focus on their core competency rather than spending on maintaining apps. This is one of the reason why more and more enterprises are turning to Cloud.

Who ate my Pie? : why filter some data and not inform the same!

2010-03-25T23:41:00.000-07:00

Whats wrong with following Visual? Spot it .....

Pie is not 100%.
The total here is only 60.92%. Why it is wrong to represent partial as full, because other part gets ignored. Here there is nearly 39% spam getting generated from other countries, which did not get highlighted at all.

Now Check following two charts visualized using Tableau instead. It communicates information to the fact covering 100% of data. Above article has one good thing that it contains country names along with %ges, this ensures users to be focused on chart rather than switching between legend and the chart color.

Thank you

MeghaServe BI Team

Bullet Graphs for Dashboards

2010-03-25T03:42:00.000-07:00

Do you often have to check your company's performance on various Indicators revenue Target to Actuals etc. Most of the BI Tools now have built in Dashboard Components like Fuel Tanks, Temperature gauges, LEDs, Speedometers, etc.. These look fancy, however may not communicate information effectively as its intended to be on your Dashboard.
Bullet Graph is one such mechanism when used considering all design aspects will yield into instantaneous and effective communication.

My recent discovery of Tableau Public visualization tool allowed me to explain this graphically as below. (Refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_graph for details on bullet graphs)

Thank you

MeghaServe BI Team

Usage of Pie Charts: Airlines Cancellation Measures

2010-02-16T19:26:00.000-08:00

Its very annoying when i see misuse of charts to communicate information.
Today I observed one such communication in 'Times of India' as ad from a well known airline as shown here. It was to communicate %ge of cancellation by various airlines.

Now look carefully, and check total %ge in the Pie.
12.6+2.2+2.8+3.6+5.8+2.5+9.2 i.e = 38.7

How come 38.7% consuming 100% of pie?. I mean if i eat full Pie, i say i have eaten 100% of it! isnt'd?! When only partial information is available to represent, we can use ' Others' as a category and fill remaining %ge there. However since here airline is a category i don't think they missed out on any airlines in Indian Market.

Secondly observe color selection, it very hard to say which airline is 2.2% blue and which is 3.6% blue! Unless you figure out that legends are sorted as per clock-wise director of the pie chart.

Lesson 1: Only when all categories add-up to 100% use Pie. Its comparison of individual again total measure.
Lesson 2: Use Colors to make distinctions easy.

OK Now coming to the correction part, I think it was intended to communicate % of cancellation out of all individual flights and then compare it with other airlines.
Here is another view of same data. Is it not better comparison?

Better yet, it they could have shown like #of flights v/s # of canceled flights as a comparison instead of %ge. Why? because if an airline having 50 flights cancels 5 it shows as 10%, where as to reach 10% its competitor having 500 flights should have canceled 50 flights!

So its all in the visual designs.

Thank you

MeghaServe BI Team

Cloud adoption and Telephone Technology a contrast

2009-09-29T21:44:00.000-07:00

One of most common restraint for Cloud adoption in established enterprises may be huge investment made in Data Center infrastructure. Its common to hear IT leaders say "we have all infrastructure ready, all we need is custom built software or product to run on it". So although Cloud Computing benefits these organization in many ways, its just because of their huge capital investments, they tend to protect it well with even more expensive software deployments.

I am contrasting this with Telephone Technology in developed countries v/s emerging countries. In emerging countries, just because there were no strong backbone of landlines, Cell phone adoption became exponential. It was available anywhere, with no waiting, within reach of common man and with out any hassles. They got most advanced communication technology in hands and never had to be concerned about land lines.

I see the same happening for cloud. The adoption would not be with few large enterprises with thousands of users. It would be with millions of emerging businesses who have not made significant investments in IT infrastructure. They will just plug-in and innovate at amazing speed.

Is it not "Simply Significant"?!..

Public Databases and Information Visualization

2009-09-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

Here is a nice blog on public databases and information visualization tools.

http://flowingdata.com/2009/09/03/what-visualization-toolsoftware-should-you-use-getting-
started

Especially check the links mentioned in this blog. Very interesting >>

Kiran

"Scholor onCloud" - force.com developer challenge submission

2009-08-09T20:12:00.000-07:00

Today i submitted a force.com application for the developer challenge. It was fun building this application from the concept around three weeks back and getting it running with all basic aspects this weekend. Interesting part of this project was how much we could accomplish in such a short time.

Platform features

Custom Objects
Apex Triggers
Email Service
Sites and simple secured access

Other features

Apex Triggers
Google Chart URLs
Google Feed API integration

Check my project at (it works btw hi ha!)
http://kiranpadiyar-developer-edition.na6.force.com/scholoroncloud

Enjoy!

Following the Best Practice

2009-07-27T10:07:00.001-07:00

After my last year's reading of "Information Dashboard Design" by Stephen Few, i have started looking at graphs and tables very differently. Try to see what could have been better visualization.

One such example i found on a website showing chemical composition of a cell phone.

On left a pie full of values to fullfill 100% and on right i have put the same in bar chart. I could have even improved it better by providing full names of chemicals and showing all chemicals having less than 5% values as Others.

I think pie works ok for small number of categories. But when it gets to 5% and below with lots of categories, it would be even better to show all less than 5% as "Others" and then if details are required, then expand 5% composition in another chart.

Thank you
MeghaServe BI Team

Embed google bullet charts in Cognos report

2009-06-29T19:48:00.000-07:00

After my recent learning about a powerful technique of representing data using Stephen Phew's bullet graphs (http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=375), i wanted to try them on a demo dashboard mainly built on Cognos.

Was constrained as Cognos lacked this chart type. Learnt about google bullet graph scripting at http://dealerdiagnostics.com/blog/2008/05/create-bullet-graphs-with-google-charts-in-7-easy-steps/

Tried embedding chart URL in Cognos as HTML element and it worked.

Following are the steps for accomplishing this using Report Studio:

1. Have all the required report elements selected on a list report

2. Add HTML element on to the list using 'insertable objects' list

3.Mark HTML source of the object as 'Report Expression' and edit the report expression considering Chart API URL specifications (listed in above links). In my case it looked like following.

4. Thats it!. Now save the report and run. You may also add some more features of the chart like performance markers.

My demo Quality dashboard looked like below

Hope you Enjoyed..

MeghaServe BI Team

Microsoft Word and Open Office behaviour with Visio

2009-06-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

Visio is good tool for drawing from Microsoft and Open Office(OO) Writer is good tool comparable to MS Word. MS Word and Visio works seamlessly when it comes to copy paste. There would not be any problem in editing the Visio copied to MS word just by Ctrl+C copy and Ctrl+V paste.
However if you do the same with Visio when pasting to OO Writer it will not show up when opened in MS Word. After encountering this problem recently with the documents (saved as .doc 97/2000/XP version) and distributed to users having MSword, Scouted for a solution and cameup with my own workaround.

1. When Pasting to OO Writer use Paste as special instead of Paste to make available in MS Word.

2. If you encounter problem with editing image, then Change the anchor setting of pasted Visio in OO Writer to 'As Character' instead of default 'As Paragraph' and save as .doc

Enjoy!
Kiran