In the morning at 6am my iPhone buzzes. But it is not the alarm clock, rather it's important information from an app. What is this, I think to myself and look sleepily at the screen: "Danger of black ice! Already 15 km traffic jam on the A3 towards Cologne!
The energy & utilities industry as a whole has experienced a seismic shift over the past five years due to rising costs and price pressures, and has become a priority discussion on the political and media agenda. Falling demand overall combined with “peakier” peaks is making supply, forecasting and public
By Cathy Enz, PhD., Lewis G. Schaeneman, Jr. Professor of Innovation & Dynamic Management, Cornell School of Hotel Administration. It seems that everyone loves to talk about innovation these days, but sadly the overuse of the word to describe minor tweaks and ordinary activities has turned it into a confusing
Imagine la siguiente situación: usted va al médico y le dice que algo le duele en la zona inferior del pecho. Ahora basado en esta corta descripción usted espera a que él le dé un diagnóstico y a que le sugiriera alguna terapia específica incluyendo un tiempo y un costo.
My previous post pondered the term disestimation, coined by Charles Seife in his book Proofiness: How You’re Being Fooled by the Numbers to warn us about understating or ignoring the uncertainties surrounding a number, mistaking it for a fact instead of the error-prone estimate that it really is. Sometimes this fact appears to
Many people know that the SAS/IML language enables you to read data from and write results to multiple SAS data sets. When you open a new data set, it is a good programming practice to close the previous data set. But did you know that you can have two data
Imagine that you’re a large retail firm, in need of projecting sales for the next few months. With the right analytical solution, it can literally take just seconds to have a forecast in place. You drag and drop some variables and can figure out exactly which ones are underlying factors
Im Vorfeld des Kongresses “ISC Big Data” sprachen wir mit Thomas Meuer über die besondere Rolle, die eine Supercomputing-Community im Bereich Big Data spielt. Der Veranstalter der ISC Big Data spricht über die Trends im High-Performance Computing (HPC), die Arbeit im CERN und beschreibt was Unternehmen von der Erfahrung im Forschungsinstitut
Data-driven marketing is all about how marketers can harness data and analytics to create a more customer-centric, fact-based approach to customer engagement. This, combined with quality execution leads to better customer experiences and improved customer equity. However when looking at customer-brand interactions in silos such as in the call centre
Imagine this situation: You go to you doctor and tell her that "something hurts in the lower chest area." Now, based on this short description of your pain, you expect her to come up with a precise diagnosis and a specific therapy suggestion, including treatment time and associated cost. Sound
I received the following email from a SAS/IML programmer: I am getting an error in a PROC IML module that I wrote. The SAS Log says NOTE: Paused in module NAME When I submit other commands, PROC IML doesn't seem to understand them. How can I continue the program? The
There is a lot of hype around the millennials now that they are a primary adult audience segment ranging in age from 18 to 33 years. And why not? They represent a whole new generation that every company will need to connect with in order to sell their products and
Recently, I was reading an online article about predictive modeling and "big data." Its premise was to determine whether the use of big data actually led to more accurate and meaningful predictive models and forecasts. After citing numerous external examples and internal tests that the authors had compiled, it stated
Let’s go back in time to the summer of 2007. The original iPhone had just been launched. Miley Cyrus was Hannah Montana. The San Antonio Spurs were NBA Champions, and LeBron James was the savior of Cleveland Cavaliers. Insurance Executives were only concerned about legacy replacement systems. On the surface,
.@philsimon on those who minimize the importance of data.
What does it take to be on the Huffington Post’s new B-team? Led by Arianna Huffington, this not-for-profit initiative is a group of global business leaders committed to making businesses more socially responsible - and blogging about it. It takes a real commitment to corporate culture, and not just the inspirational
In a previous blog post I showed how to order a set of variables by a statistic. After reshaping data, you can create a graph that contains box plots for many variables. Ordering the variables by some statistic (mean, median, variance,...) helps to differentiate and distinguish the variables. You can
I’m sure, like me, you've been annoyed at being stuck in a traffic jam in a city centre somewhere, or been frustrated at your kids leaving lights on, or annoyed with the heating coming on when the weather’s warmed up and you've not got round to adjusting the thermostat. Now,
Capital investment in production capability is the weakest link in the business value chain. It always has been and likely always will be. It’s the driving force behind the tendency towards cartels, collusion and monopolies. While it can make the first entrant into a brand new market, in the long
I recall that in the not too distant past customer segmentation, in its many guises, was once a flavour of the times. Segmentation was (and still is) however, a greatly misused term, with organisations confusing the (correct) approach of offering a strategic view of a customer base with the more
Imagine you are the race director for a Formula One car. Decisions must be made within seconds, sometimes in the blink of an eye. When speed is of utmost importance, it is necessary for race engineers to have all relevant race data at their fingertips. Instead of having a couple of
When I create a graph of data that contains a categorical variable, I rarely want to display the categories in alphabetical order. For example, the box plot to the left is a plot of 10 standardized variables where the variables are ordered by their median value. The ordering makes it
Okay, let's say your data is in Hadoop. The distributed, open source framework is configured as it should be across low-cost servers and your data is sitting in those clusters. It's been a meaningful effort to get to this point but how does it benefit your organization? If it's not doing something
Back in January, I told you about this amazing project that Ed was working on, and now it’s done. Get ready. It’s a textbook—a science textbook about the stars. “Say what?” you might be thinking. Well, trust me. This book is cool! Ed has been teaming with the Space Telescope
And now for the five steps: 1. Ignore industry benchmarks, past performance, arbitrary objectives, and what management "needs" your accuracy to be. Published benchmarks of industry forecasting performance are not relevant. See this prior post The perils of forecasting benchmarks for explanation. Previous forecasting performance may be interesting to know, but
It is after Labor Day in the US, meaning we must no longer wear white shoes, skirts, jackets, or trousers. But even if you are now going sans-culotte, it is time to begin thinking about organizational performance objectives for 2015. Setting forecasting performance objectives is one way for management to shine...or
I wanted to pass along this reminder from Pam Stroud at the International Institute of Forecasters: Grant to Promote Research on Forecasting For the twelfth year, the IIF, in collaboration with SAS®, is proud to announce financial support for research on how to improve forecasting methods and business forecasting practice.
Today is my fourth blog-iversary: the anniversary of my first blog post in 2010. To celebrate, I am going to write a series of fun posts based on The Code Book by Simon Singh, a fascinating account of the history of cryptography from ancient times until the present. While reading
Admit it - you were fascinated by the 3D pipes screensaver! How many CPU cycles did we let our machines burn up, drawing and re-drawing those silly pipes!?! What was your personal favorite CPU-hungry screensaver? (let us know in a comment!) Well, speaking of pipes, the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline
Writing my previous post about digital banks got me thinking about the widespread use of analytics. In his book Digital Bank, Chris Skinner states that data should be seen as the most critical asset for digital banks. Actually, this holds true for almost every company nowadays. If you don’t have data of
