7 January 2016
As part of the industry outreach at the Big Data and Analytics Program, SP Jain invited Fractal Analytics to conduct a workshop on problem-solving to educate the students on the strategies and methodology employed in the industry to solve basic analytics problems.
Mr. Rahul Desai, Vice President at Fractal Analytics, conducted the session. The session informed the students about the logical framework that is used by the analytics firm to provide analytical solutions to business problems faced by companies in banking, media, retail and several other diverse industries. Mr. Desai also shared the step by step logical process that is used to break almost any business problem to an analytics problem.
The students were then divided into groups and a business problem was assigned to each group. The business problems were real business problems faced by businesses in the IT, banking, retail and hospitality industry. The students were given a time of three weeks to come up with a solution to the problem by following the exact methodology that was explained in the workshop. Additionally, they were asked to prepare a professional presentation outlining their solution as well as the approach that they followed to arrive at it.
The presentations were judged by an expert panel that consisted of experts from Fractal as well senior faculty from the school. The students displayed extraordinary acumen and ingenuity to come up with original solutions to the business problems. The panel was impressed by the insight of the solutions as well as the professional presentations created by the students. The expert panel gave feedback to the students on their solutions, and made corrections where they felt the students had erred in approaching the problem.
However the panel agreed that most of the solutions offered by the students addressed the crux of the problem and this exhibited the student’s to problem-solving. The students themselves were very satisfied with the workshop as it allowed them to use the problem solving methods used in the industry as well as exposed them to the problems that can be solved by the use of analytics. They look forward to similar workshops with other industry insiders in the future.