Image: Fight To The Top: Is Collaboration The New Competition, from TheOneBrief

In a previous article, I briefly went over the purposeful 6-year history of the SFU BADM Hackathon and Industry Forum.

The event serves as a platform to connect and assist in the accelerated growth of analytics in the Greater Vancouver Area.

As a former participant and current alumnus of the SFU Beedie and BADM programs, the event holds a special place in my heart. Aside from it being the reason that I landed my first job in analytics, the main reasons I value this hackathon are:

• An opportunity to create new connections with other analytics leaders here in Vancouver
• An occasion to deepen old connections from previous encounters
• A chance to learn and discuss best practices, as well as share experiences with the growing analytics community

The Analytics Legend of Vancouver 2020

As a member of the 2020 Industry Forum Steering Committee, I had the pleasure of working alongside some well-established Analytics leaders in Vancouver.

This year’s steward, Matt St. John, Director of Ecommerce & Technology Analytics at Best Buy Canada (also my boss), encouraged me to bring some new form of excitement into the event.

With a lot of St. John’s coaching (and perhaps entirely biased by a life of sports and competition), I proposed a new competition to the Industry Forum: The Analytics Legend of Vancouver.

A Symposium of Analytics Achievement by Analytics Pros, for Analytics Pros

Students use the BADM Hackathon as their way to learn, share, and connect with the Analytics community in Vancouver. Those who commit to this and perform well can be rewarded with exciting internships and job prospects.

Why not create a similar event for industry pros?

The Analytics Legend of Vancouver competition is all about connecting data pros in the GVA. It puts the spotlight on the most promising analytics initiatives happening in British Columbia.

In the first-ever competition, six organizations were voted in by their peers to share why their greatest analytics achievement this year deserved legendary status, in 7 minutes or less.

The organization that was able to illustrate superior analytics innovation, transformative business impact, or dazzling presentation skills would be crowned The Legend by their peers.

1. Ernst & Young

Presented by Kanika Sanduja, Senior Consultant & Sam Mazerolle, AI Consultant

Topic: Using Deep Q Reinforcement Learning to optimize front-end collections treatment for Big Banks.

Intro: How do the big banks use their data to inform smarter debt collection strategies? Traditional collections strategies are devised based on broad customer risk exposure segments customers are assigned to. This generalized approach ignores the relative cost of the benefits of competing treatments and creates inefficiencies in treatment resource allocation.

Solution: A front-end collections treatment strategy using a Deep-Q Reinforcement Learning model.

2. Aritzia

Presented by Olivier Duval, Director of Digital Analytics

Topic: Building a one-stop-shop analytics portfolio that combines sales, returns, onsite customer behaviour, and product reviews to identify opportunities.

Intro: As a vertically integrated fashion company, Aritzia designs, manufactures, and sells women’s clothing under private brands. How can analytics support the various teams and help improve decisions around designing, buying, planning, and merchandising products?

Solution: A one-stop-shop analytics portfolio that combines sales, returns, onsite customer behaviour, and product reviews to enable the identification of opportunities.

3. Rocky Mountaineer

Presented by Michael Lake, Manager of Data Analytics

Topic: Building a sales optimization scheduling tool in PowerBI to identify opportunities for the Outside Sales team.

Intro: Rocky Mountaineer’s North American Outside Sales team members faced the challenge of covering large geographic areas with limited time and resources. In most cases, it was three or more states/provinces. How might the analytics team identify opportunities and optimize their efforts?

Solution: The team built a PowerBI mapping tool that allowed the Outside Sales team to visualize all branch locations in their territory, understand the priority of visiting each of them, and plan their sales visits in the market.

4. Best Buy Canada

Presented by Joshua Loong, Data Scientist

Topic: Utilizing a novel testing methodology for a new multi-channel experience in order to manage risk and understand the true impact before the busy holiday season.

Intro: If the retail industry were a sport, the holiday season would be the playoffs. This year, the teams at Best Buy Canada faced the challenge of designing and creating a safe and optimized multi-channel retail experience in time for the holidays. A solution that, if proven a winner, needed to go live in 130 stores across the country. The analytics teams needed to develop a test approach that would communicate risk to the senior leadership team and didn’t require randomization at the user level (since it’s a combined online and offline experience).

Solution: The analytics team used advanced counterfactual modeling to compare a number of cities with the new experience to a synthetic group of other regions with the old experience, based on cross-functional datasets from e-commerce, store, finance, and user experience.

5. Coast Capital Savings

Presented by Rob Hollerin, Director of Analytics and Data Science

Topic: Learning how Coast Capital Savings has leverage analytics across the organization to navigate through the Pandemic.

Intro: How did one of the most well-known credit unions in the lower mainland use analytics to navigate the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic? The team at Coast Capital Savings walked us through some of the most exciting initiatives they worked on throughout the year.

Solution: From integrating new data sources to machine learning and qualitative research in order to identify and support their COVID impacted members, the work this year allowed the analytics team to improve their understanding of member behaviour and the financial implication in these changing times.

6. Vancouver Coastal Health

Presented by Aleem Teja, Director of System Improvement

Topic: Increasing patient traffic safely during the pandemic in order to deliver timely care

Intro: Not all superheroes wear capes, some wear scrubs! In the wake of one of the most devastating pandemics that has swept the modern world, the team at Vancouver Coastal Health asked us to imagine visiting one of their hospitals during the pandemic. Picture this: you have an app that tells you how long it will take to travel to the outpatient clinic. You get there early, but you are surprised by a long lineup for the elevators. Now you may be thinking, will you make it to your appointment on time?

Solution: The superhero analytics team at Vancouver Coastal Health told a riveting story on how they used modeling masks to increase elevator throughput. Decision-makers at VGH’s Gordon and Leslie Diamond Healthcare Centre implemented social distancing guidelines to keep patients safe on the way to their clinic appointments.

This year’s Analytics Legend of Vancouver

All six presentations were fantastic, but there can only be one champ: this year, Michael Lake and Rocky Mountaineer were crowned the 2020 Analytics Legend of Vancouver!

Michael and his team exemplified what it means to be an analytics leader in Vancouver. It’s not always about the most complex algorithm; it is critical to realize that analytics does not win in silos. Before you write a line of code, there are two magical ingredients needed to cook up a win: problem identification, and bringing others along for the ride.

“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”

Albert Einstein

Perhaps inspired by the great Albert Einstein, the data folks at Rocky Mountaineer prioritized focusing on the right problem and delivered a BI tool that significantly improved the productivity of their Outside Sales team. Pair that with a masterful sprinkle of analytics wow factor, and it’s no surprise that the team earned the Analytics Legend of Vancouver title.

Eternal bragging rights, a custom trophy supplied by SFU, and a great conversation starter for the next time we meet. Special mention to Best Buy Canada and Vancouver Coastal Health who were this year’s runners-ups.

Think your team is worthy of analytic legend status? Well, then I expect to see you at next year’s Industry Forum.