AE Stories

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) used in the right way offer companies new and unprecedented opportunities to tap into. For the man and woman in the street it brings many new and exciting advances in their everyday lives. However, they also have a dark side. When we design algorithms and train models based on data of a privileged minority group, ML model outcomes (like predictions, recommendations, classifications,...) have the ability to discriminate and exclude large parts of the population in a way that is not acceptable. Fact is that we don’t always realize this, and thus need to be very careful and build in checks to avoid these circumstances.

These days, achieving true operational excellence is impossible without a thorough understanding of your processes and how they relate to the needs of your staff or customers. Lean processes mean elimination of unnecessary work, reducing errors and focusing on what is really important. It is key to keep costs under control and to level production and service up to speed.

Being truly operational excellent requires, apart from the deep understanding of your processes, a grasp of the constraints and prerequisites they are subject to. Operational excellence is all about having a collaborative focus on your customer’s needs, keeping team members positive and empowered, and continually improving the current activities in the workplace. Effective workforce planning, well organized supply chain operations, preventing production lines from breaking down, efficient use of infrastructure, keeping energy consumption under control, workplace safety… Just to name a few examples.

DP World Antwerp is a leading terminal operator in the port of Antwerp. With the help of automatic, semi-automatic and manual processes, the company prepares countless containers arriving by ship for both domestic and foreign transport. In their search to optimise their complex processes and achieve operational excellence, the company recently called upon our expertise and data-driven approach.

Last year has been quite exciting, full of wonderful events and the joyful welcoming of a few new members to our AE family. Before we said goodbye to the year of 2018, we held our end-of-year Analytics foyer in December.

During this festive edition, our team of Data Scientists shared a number of different success stories we realised together with our customers in 2018. In our previous blog post Looking Back at our Analytics foyer: Part 1, we presented a deep dive into these different successes brought during this inspiring evening.

In my last blog post I talked about the strategic and competitive advantages that can be delivered by Business Analytics but that a lot of companies are still struggling to apply Analytics and actually gain these advantages. This post is the first in a series of three where the added value of Analytics in Marketing will be discussed.