What does a Data Consultant Do?
DASE: Data Analytics, Science, and Engineering
Intro
At DASE we best describe the data consultant as a Data Accountant. Businesses have needed accountants to keep their books in order for centuries; the modern business needs that same support from a data perspective. With the rise of more intelligent Point-of-Sale terminals, Google Ads, Marketing Campaigns, and Customer Profiles DASE recognizes that all of this data is alittle overwhelming to organize, and even more difficult to take action on. A data consultant has the expertise to help you understand what aspects of your data has the highest Return on Investment and how to take action on those specific areas to drive growth and data-driven decision making.
Our approach merges core data concepts with your businesses’ data maturity. Depending on where you are in your journey from just starting out to more advanced data management you may fall into one of the following stages of data needs.
Descriptive: What is Happening?
In the descriptive stage the goal is to describe what we already know and even uncover new insights. This stage of data maturity is easily the most important because it sets the foundation of every stage that follows. This includes organizing, cleaning and setting the basis of truth that will drive every analysis to follow. In this stage we will take the intuition of a business stakeholder and translate it to numbers. As an example many businesses know that they have a certain amount of sales from their membership based platform, and a particular amount in sales of merchandise. DASE can take that same information from your system and break it down even further to see what items are being sold specifically, categorize those items and even shed some light on membership distributions.
Diagnostic: Why is it Happening?
Once foundational data has been established we can start uncovering why things are happening. Following the previous example of breaking down spend to more detailed categories; it’s possible to see that a particular category has specific peaks and valleys over time. We can expand our questioning to:
- What categories seem to move with the seasons for your business and which are not dependent on the seasons?
- Profits are dipping but sales are high. Why is that? (Potential high volume products that sell well are a net loss due to costs of shipping and stocking costs).
- Total Membership is down but revenue and profits are up. (Day Pass, Merchandise, and niche offerings may be the bigger driver of profit in a traditionally membership based business)
The diagnostic step helps us expose any subtle business impacting element, whether positive or negative so that we can take action where it matters most.
Predictive: What will happen?
Prediction is where statistics and data really hit the open road. Here we can take that seasonal understanding, and plug them into time series analysis that tell us what things might trend towards. We can also create custom designed algorithms to undersand the critical difference of when a customer will go from being a returning customer to someone that never comes back.
Prescriptive: How can we create a desired outcome?
Prescriptive data maturity is a highly targeted stage where DASE can provide expert advice, optimization, and simulation to help make decisions. This involves an in depth understanding of each of the previous stages and requires a high degree of data maturity. At this stage we can start to make concrete statements regarding dynamic pricing, optimal route analysis in delivery industries, marketing budget optimization, or stock optimization by understanding critical Reorder Points and Safety Stock. At this stage we you would hear us say something like this regarding optimizing stock:
By focusing on your “key drivers” - 20% of your products that drive 80% of your revenue - we’ve automated your core replenishment: for these key items you must order 50 units the moment you hit 20 in stock to ensure a 98% confidence to remain consistently stocked. For the remaining long-tail items, we recommend a ‘Bulk & Forget’ strategy to maximize volume discounts and free up 10 hours of your team’s week for higher-value work
Final Thoughts
Regardless of where you are in your data maturity model DASE can offer free initial consultation to explain where we can jump in and support your data goals at each level. We can even help you get started down the path of being a data mature business with advice on what data to collect, how to organize it and start describing your business by the numbers.