Three teams of graduate students provided invaluable analytic take-aways to two of Atlanta’s top brands at the Fall Business Analytics Showcase. Moe’s Southwest Grill and NCR, a member of the Business Analytic Center’s Executive Council, sponsored the event and challenged the students with real-world business analytics problems to solve. The students spent the fall semester gathering data and finding solutions and recommendations. They then presented their findings at the Showcase to an audience of corporate guests, Georgia Tech faculty and staff, and other students.
“The Georgia Tech Business Analytics Showcase program provided great business insights for NCR as a participating member,” said Ivan Alvarez, NCR IT Vice President – Big Data and Analytics. “Specifically, we always receive a different perspective from the Georgia Tech MBA students. They bring industry experience from their own professional career development and are well qualified to give us innovative ways of thinking and approaching solutions to the challenges that we propose to them.”
For the students, it was an opportunity to go beyond the classroom.
"I really enjoyed working on the customer attrition analysis for NCR," said Osama Mikawi, a full-time MBA student graduating in 2020. "The best part was implementing what we learned in class into actionable, real-world solutions for real-world challenges. NCR was great to work with, very helpful and open, and they pushed us to think outside the box for optimal solutions."
Two of the teams worked on the customer attrition problem for NCR while the final team analyzed Moe’s loyalty program.
"We had a great time working with Moe's Southwest Grill and their loyalty program. We learned a lot from working with their vast data set and were able to develop key recommendations on how they can better engage with their customers,” said Jordan Peet, an MBA candidate graduating in 2020. “Presenting at the showcase was the icing on the cake. The showcase was a great opportunity to share the results of our semester long project and get feedback from analysts at some of the top companies in the country. We had a lot of fun working on this project and it really came through in our presentation."
For the sponsoring companies, it was an opportunity to get involved with the Scheller Business Analytics Center and benefit from the student’s semester-long project.
“We are so thankful for this opportunity to partner with Scheller’s Business Analytics students to explore and mine our loyalty data so that we can identify ways to better target and serve our loyalty program guests,” said Anna Oneta, CRM Manager at Moe’s Southwest Grill. “The showcase was a success and the student’s insights were incredibly valuable. “We intend to take their recommendations and implement it into our loyalty strategy. It has been such a pleasure working with the students and Professor Werle.”
The students' creative and high-energy presentations took 30 minutes, with 10 minutes for audience Q&A. After the event, students networked with the corporate sponsors and guests. Participating students included: Philip Bencina, Mridula Bhasin, Peter Cuomo, Justin Haffad, Jianan Jin, Sarah Lenceski, Osama Mikawi, Neel Mitragotri, Dylan Monteiro, Alexander Paulsen, Jordan Peet, Kyle Weaver, Eric Yi, and Xihui Yin.
“All the teams did a fantastic job,” said Professor Keith Werle, Managing Director of the Business Analytics Center. “We couldn’t be prouder of how well they represented Scheller College and Georgia Tech tonight.”