Managing Profitability Leakage in Enterprise Sales

Students are working with the Hilti finance team to determine a fair market pricing model based on customer segmentation and revenue potential. The goal is to form fundamental guidelines around pricing based on statistical analysis of Hilti’s current sales data combined with an understanding of business processes. Hilti is a global leader in providing technology-leading products, software and services to the worldwide construction industry through quality, innovation and direct customer relationships.

Optimizing Agricultural Output at a California Farm

The project goal is to provide Bowles management with actionable intelligence on crop rotation to strategically optimize yields and revenues. As a companion to optimized crop rotation, the students are tasked with creating a risk management practice to robustly predict and minimize negative impacts of factors such as water allocations, market prices, and weather. The 11,000-acre Bowles Farm, where the company grows cotton, tomatoes, field crops, and specialty produce, is managed by the sixth generation of farm owners in California’s Central Valley.

Based in San Francisco, Autodesk is a global leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software that helps people imagine, design, and create a better world.

Multiple MSBA student teams have worked with Autodesk’s data scientists, engineers, and business leaders. The first team examined how Autodesk can better engage with cloud customers throughout their subscription lifecycle. The second team analyzed the performance of key operational systems to improve performance and end-user experience. The third team worked with Autodesk’s product managers and data scientists on analytics to support customer success programs.  

The MSBA team is applying Machine Learning and advanced Data Science to drive customer retention, churn and expansion decisions at this cloud-based enterprise log management and analytics-as-a-service vendor. The analysis combines usage data from Sumo’s petabyle-scale platform and its CRM to identify strategies for customer retention and opportunities for market expansion. Sumo Logic is a SaaS company that helps customers monitor, troubleshoot and secure business-critical applications via a secure, cloud-native, continuous intelligence platform.

Reviewbox is an early stage technology startup focused on delivering e-commerce data and analytics to consumer brands. Their software continually aggregates data across Amazon, Walmart.com, and several other major e-commerce sites. Currently, Reviewbox utilizes their dashboard for descriptive analytics. They have partnered with the UC Davis MSBA Program to try to drive more meaningful insights through three sub-projects that involve predictive and prescriptive analytics. The sub-projects involve exploring relationships between reviews and search and sales rank, understanding the buy box dynamics and Amazon Ads optimization.

Reviewbox's mission is to continuously help brands and manufacturers bridge the knowledge gap between data accessibility and the development of actionable insights derived from the information collected across eCommerce marketplaces. Their software continually aggregates data across Amazon, Walmart.com, and several other major e-commerce sites. Since its 2019-20 practicum sponsorship, Reviewbox has merged with the customer intelligence firm Talkwalker. The MSBA student team is applying machine learning and advanced statistics to build market share and sales estimators - data unavailable to customers of major ecommerce platforms.

The PeopleFun Practicum team will use exploratory data analysis, clustering, and other advanced data science practices to better understand the gamers, enhance revenue, and increase gamer retention this premier game studio. PeopleFun created Wordscapes and Word Stacks, which are the #1 and #2 word games on the Google and Apple stores.

The analysis draws insights from 20 TB of game player data for 570,000+ users. Founded in 2011 by the former leadership of Ensemble Studios, PeopleFun prides itself on its highly talented development team, creativity, rapid prototyping, teamwork and fun. Over 25 million monthly active users play PeopleFun’s games.

The Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts is a performance venue situated on the UC Davis campus, hosting 70+ shows each season.

Customer Engagement in Performing Arts 

Students will create dashboards to track customer sentiment surveys and email marketing metrics. The dashboards will help the marketing team understand the effectiveness of various email campaigns and how different audience clusters respond to offers. 

UC Davis’s Koret Shelter Medicine Program aims to help shelters increase the number of animals they are able to process without wasting resources and while providing these animals with the best possible outcome for their situation. Working closely with the UC Davis Graduate School of Management professor Dr. David Woodruff, this practicum team is augmenting the mathematical optimization model through analytics tools. Using both data from existing animal shelters and simulating realistic data, we aim to build a robust unsupervised classification model through Machine Learning. In the meantime, the team is implementing the optimization model into a website hosted on AWS. With functions such as displaying personalized visualizations of analysis based on input data and giving suggestions using the optimization model, this website helps shelters manage their capacity.

Leveraging data science and AI-powered software, Engage3 helps retailers and brands enhance their performance through localized competitive intelligence and optimized pricing strategies.

Soda, Scorecards and Discounts - Optimal Pricing at Engage 3 

On this project students will dig deep into large, real-world data sets and understand consumer behavior from both the consumer and retailer perspective. In addition to opportunities to implement descriptive analytics, this project offers a rich test bed to improve students forecasting (prescriptive analytics) skill set. 

The COPA Data Initiative team is responsible for optimizing the current search engine for the COPA online forum by developing a content scoring system. The focus is on improving the user experience by providing weighted search results with the help of Natural Language Processing. This would involve developing KPIs to determine the improvement of the search functionality after the implementation of the model. On the administrative side, the COPA team aims to provide a dashboard to monitor site performance through custom metrics.