Contributed by: Ashween Kumar
I am Ashween Kumar living happily with my parents, wife & kids in Delhi. I love to spend my free time with my family. I am interested in exploring different dimensions of knowledge by reading/listening to audiobooks, talking to people to understand their views on different things. I also love to read about history, science (Ancient and modern) & Mythology.
Talking about my Profession, I am a Six sigma GB certified, with 11 years of experience in the Finance & accounts domain. I have worked with companies like IBM, Genpact and Energy consultants where I have handled business knowledge transitions & travelled to different parts of the world like Germany, Poland, ME region like KSA, UAE, Oman etc. I have also taken care of different LOBs like Order to cash/Revenue cycle management with Industry types such as Healthcare, FMCG and Oil and Gas sectors.
Before joining PGP-DSBA at Great Learning in 2020, I worked as a Manager of Finance and accounts with one of the Renowned Energy consultants and was pursuing my MBA from NMIMS. At the same time, I handled multiple projects- Sales forecasting, Revenue/Cost analysis and industry-standard ratio analysis.
I talked about the problem I had been facing at my workplace and how to make the data correctly & easily available. Presenting the available data to the management with the insights and visualization was difficult since the data was with different teams. It was not in the usable format with which the interpretation could be derived.
I decided to collect the data as much as possible and make it more readable. I worked on cleaning the data, where I applied the data cleaning techniques I learned during the program like filling the missing values with mean, InterQuartile Range & removing the outliers, finding the noise in the data etc.
In my current organization, the problem I identified was regarding the data collation and visualization. The data collation was a manual task, and there were different challenges when it comes to the business insights of the available data, since there is no analytics (inhouse) team available hence I decided to take the 2020 performance of the group and made it more presentable, visual, understandable which helped the Higher management to take better decisions related to the budgets of 2021 and the performance objectives for the upcoming year.
Sales forecasting for the year 2021 was also to be done for one line of business. I applied the Time series forecasting technique and presented the details to the board for review, which helped me understand the current situation and increase sales.
The tool I used to work on the mentioned tasks was Python & Tableau public. I applied the learning which was taught in different sessions of the DSBA batch. It helped a lot in the overall visualization presentation with the detailed business insights which I prepared.
The recommendations to the organization were given related to the budget allocation/sales and cost control for the group basis the past performance, which could help the organization achieve the targeted margins.
As the business problem described above was affecting the organization business due to the lack of analytical clarity/insight of the performance of the overall business, the decisions taken or the budget allocation each year was not helping the organization to achieve the desired targets.
To solve this problem, I applied techniques for data cleaning and EDA, such as Imputing the missing values with mean, reducing the outliers or the noise in the data with IQR, Basic Exploratory data analysis like Heat map, Box plots, pair plots, describe function in python etc.
Apart from the EDA for model building or the interpretation, I applied the Time series forecasting technique to predict the sales and use Tableau public to make the data more presentable for the management review.
Post the analysis; I came across the below-mentioned insights, which I presented to the board.
- One segment was very high in generating revenue with a low cost attached to it.
- One segment was very low in revenue generation with a high-cost factor attached to it.
- Sales prediction was different from what the management had in mind or discussed with the customer.
- Cost centres with the high cost and low margin were identified.
I also suggested replacing the low revenue-generating segment with the new segment with comparatively low cost.
On the sales prediction part, I suggested having a discussion with the customer on the agreement and to get more business/revenue since the contract with the customer was yearly and with different values which were not meeting as per the analysis.
The exercise benefited me in many ways.
I applied my learning and gained the experience which will always be with me throughout my entire professional career, on the other hand, I proved my skills to the management, which increased their trust in me, which would help me further in my career and growth in the organization.
If you wish to upskill, join Great Learning’s PGP Data Science and Business Analytics Course. For more such success stories, watch this space.
