MSBA Practicum Project

Lucky Brand
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Lucky Brand

Omni-channel Merchandising at Fashion Retailer

Optimizing the product assortment at nearly 250 retail locations and integrating the in-store customer experience with its rapidly expanding e-commerce channel is key to Lucky Brand’s profit strategy. This multi-dimensional project gives students exposure to the company’s different organizational processes including demand management, facility planning, and merchandising. Founded in 1990 in Los Angeles, Lucky is an iconic American lifestyle brand specializing in denim.

Institute for Transportation Studies – UC Davis
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Institute for Transportation Studies – UC Davis

Innovative Business Models for California’s Electric Vehicle Infrastructure

The plug-in electric vehicle market is growing quickly in California, with 1.2-1.5 million vehicles expected on our roads by 2025 and 5 million by 2030. Public charging is critical for drivers who need more range, don’t have home charging, have slow chargers, or travel longer distances. The students are analyzing charging event data in collaboration with ITS-Davis researchers to design sustainable business models and capacity expansion strategies for charging station providers. ITS-Davis is the leading university

Hilti Corporation
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Hilti Corporation

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.

Bowles Farming Company
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Bowles Farming Company

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

Autodesk
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Autodesk

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

Sumo Logic
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Sumo Logic

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
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Reviewbox

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

PeopleFun
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PeopleFun

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

Mondavi Center
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Mondavi Center

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. 

Several MSBA projects supported the development of a new pricing strategy for the largest concert hall and revamped the existing membership program to maximize revenue for

Koret
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Koret

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

Engage3
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Engage3

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 most powerful P&L

COPA Data Initiative
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COPA Data Initiative

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.

BARCO Healthcare
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BARCO Healthcare

BARCO Healthcare, is a multinational company headquartered in Kortrijk, Belgium. The student team is helping to analyze the data and workflow aspects of Multidisciplinary Tumor Board Meetings. Objectives include developing business analytics dashboards, measuring ROI and defining and capturing meeting efficiency KPIs. 

Asian Art Museum
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Asian Art Museum

The Asian Art Museum (AAM) is home to one of the world’s finest collection of Asian art with an expansive permanent collection and dynamic special exhibitions and public programs. AAM is currently undergoing a $90 million expansion project set to complete in 2020. The MSBA team is supporting AAM during this expansion by developing a statistical model to help predict attendance for special exhibitions, allowing the museum to better meet yearly earned revenue goals while maximizing public engagement with the museum’s art and cultural programs.

Air Safety Institute – NASA
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Air Safety Institute – NASA

Air Safety Institute (ASI) is devoted to improving the safety of pilots in the field of general aviation (GA) through industry-leading research. The fatal accidents affect everyone in the field deeply and the situation is calling for more analysis of the untapped accident report, the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) database.

Therefore, it is collaborating with MSBA students to analyze and determine causal factors for problematic phenomena in general aviation using Natural Language Processing. Leveraging descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive analysis, the student team helps ASI

BlueMatrix
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BlueMatrix

BlueMatrix is a leading platform for the authoring, distribution, and analysis of the consumption of financial research. It connects the world’s leading asset and wealth managers with nearly 1,000 research firms in more than 50 countries, in addition to serving internal teams across multinational corporations. Under the direction of the office of the CIO, MSBA students are analyzing fine-grain usage data from BlueMatrix's terabyte-scale SAAS platform. The goal is to analyze potential opportunities to create value for BlueMatrix's staff and customers and create robust predictive and search

Kiva
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Kiva

Kiva is an international nonprofit, founded in 2005 in San Francisco, with a mission to help the more than 1.7 billion unbanked around the world who cannot access much-needed financial services. MSBA students are developing analytical insights and models to enable Kiva to grow the value and use of its programs. Specifically, they are employing data science to understand how to increase uptake and stickiness, which product and marketing features provide greatest value to users, and how to position different lending products to maximize impact.

Packsize
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Packsize

Packsize is among a very few companies worldwide creating “right-sized packaging” – shipping packages that are optimally sized to the dimensions of their contents - through its hardware and software solutions. Its products have an enormous environmental impact, reducing the use of corrugated fiberboard as well as fill materials like polystyrene, as well as shipping costs and damage. MSBA students are applying analytics to design next-generation automation solutions that combine image acquisition from state-of-the-art stereoscopic cameras with Packsize's existing packaging and fulfillment

Public Storage
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Public Storage

Established in 1972, Public Storage is the world’s leading self-storage company. A part of the Fortune 500 (NYSE: PSA), Public Storage owns and operates 2500+ facilities across 38 states; we employ thousands of associates across the United States. Public Storage believes that analyzing and improving digital customer engagement is a critical differentiator that we can use to create even more customer value. To that end, the goal of the MSBA project is to develop a full-stack analytics implementation focused on eCommerce analytics.

REEF
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REEF

Part of SoftBank’s worldwide portfolio of companies revolutionizing business and commerce with cutting-edge technology, REEF transforms underutilized urban spaces into neighborhood hubs that connect people to locally curated goods, services, and experiences. REEF is the largest operator of mobility, logistics hubs, and neighborhood kitchens in the United States, Canada, and has a growing presence in Europe. Partnering with the MSBA program allows REEF to pair its rich data infrastructure with cutting-edge decision technologies and enthusiastic young talent from UC Davis to boost its workforce