Innovate UK have funded a knowledge transfer partnership on "Integrating Demand Management and Routing Operations" from June 2018 - December 2020. The project will deliver the development, testing and deployment of an innovative decision support system to assist Slicker Recycling in their nation-wide collections of waste oil. Prof Juergen Branke is the lead academic, Dr Vladimir Deineko and Dr Arne Strauss are the academic supervisors. The project has overall funding of £211k.

As a member of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Analytics Curriculum Advisory Group, Dr Arne Strauss (WBS) will be a facilitator at the next AASCB data analytics seminar taking place in Tempe, Arizona, from 19-20 March 2018.

As part of the AACSB curriculum development series, the seminar will focus on how to develop, implement and deliver data analytics programs and other curriculum components that meet the highest academic standards consistent with AACSB accreditation expectations, as well as the needs of the business community and prospective students. Original content, cases, discussions, group activities, meetings with data analytics executives, and other experiences have been designed to assist business schools initiate and expand their work in this area.

Dr Strauss, who is Academic Director of WBS’ MSc Business Analytics programme, will be a facilitator at the event together with international professors from advisory group.

More information on the AACSB event is available here.

Our MSc Business Analytics programme has been ranked 7th in the world in the most recent QS University ranking of Business Analytics programmes: for more information on the ranking, see:

https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/business-masters-rankings/business-analytics/2018

For more information on the programme itself, click here.

Yifan Cao, an MSc Business Analytics student at WBS, has won the First Prize of the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) Masters Research Dissertation Programme in 2017, coming with a cash award of £500.

The CDRC is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and consists of researchers at Leeds, UCL, Liverpool and Oxford. The Master Research Dissertation Programme links retailers with students nationally who conduct analytic research on retail data.

Yifan conducted an empirical study using online grocery sales data from Sainsbury’s to model customer choice behaviour in the context of delivery time slot selection. Specifically, she devised and estimated the parameters of a nested choice model that first considers the choice of the day of delivery, followed by choice of the time slot within a given day. The choice model has been validated using some holdout sample data and has been found to predict slot choice behaviour very well. The output of this work can be used, for example, to improve the efficiency of home delivery logistics.

Generally, all the projects this year were really good so it was a particular achievement.

Guy Lansley, CDRC

Yifan’s project broke new ground for Sainsbury’s in providing a methodologically robust analysis of the interaction between the slots offered to customers and their likelihood of their placing orders. Her approach is being integrated within our in-house tools for the management of slot availability to optimise performance of the Sainsbury’s Online business. We thank Yifan for her valuable contribution.
Joel Lindop, Online Forecasting & Optimistion Manager at Sainsbury’s

Yifan produced excellent work on a challenging topic; the estimation of a choice model as complex as this is not trivial. She overcame major technical obstacles, and provided the retailer with valuable insights.

Arne Strauss, Course Director MSc Business Analytics (and Yifan’s dissertation supervisor)

Dr Arne Strauss (University of Warwick) and Dr Christine Currie (University of Southampton) organise a one-day workshop in The Shard in central London to identify future research directions in the intersection of demand management (dynamic pricing, choice modelling, personalisation etc), privacy preservation and related issues against the background of a changing environment (as reflected e.g. by the sharing economy, smart grids, private data aggregators, General Data Protection Regulation, e-Privacy Regulation etc).

The workshop will include presentations from experts and users in the area (confirmed speakers include Prof Graham Cormode, Warwick Computer Science and Alan Turing Institute; Prof Mandy Chessell, IBM Distinguished Engineer and IBM Master Inventor; Prof Irene Ng, Director, International Institute of Product and Service Innovation); an introduction to the framework from Dr Stalla-Bourdillon (Law, University of Southampton) and facilitated discussions to develop research questions.

For more information, see the workshop announcement.