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Experience by Industry
Speak to an industry expertOur team members come from a vast array of industry backgrounds. In addition to a deep knowledge of business analytics, they have a front-line feel for their industry realities. Parsing data is not enough. Without knowing the pressures facing specific industries and what questions to ask, its difficult to select the right markers to track. Our team has consulted in all the industries, and with all the companies, noted below. And then some!
Healthcare
Healthcare company management teams must grapple with myriad challenges within a healthcare system that requires improved internal procedures, monitoring methods and trend reporting. Both private and public reporting must address rates of tests and surgeries relative to specific diagnoses (compared by region), patient infection rates and hospital errors. To assess true claim and care costs by area and illness type, revenue management and allocation of activity costs become critical metrics. Increasingly, test results help support government funding requirements and other reimbursement sources…making accuracy all the more critical.
- University of California San Francisco
- Kaiser Permanente
- CRC Health Group Inc.
- CenCal Health
- Partnership Healthplan of California
- Blue Cross Blue Shield
- Sutter Health Services
- Willis, Towers, Watson
Financial services & insurance
Few industries face the challenges of financial service and insurance companies. They must simultaneously allocate resources to incorporate mobile and social media applications; develop new sources of revenue; maintain profitability despite low interest rates; increase the actual and perceived value of customer relationships; improve business processes; support new regulatory issues from Dodd-Frank, Basel III and the CFPB; and integrate enterprise data to support both internal management and marketing efforts. By wisely reorganizing data, business analytics can help managers prioritize these demands.
- Visa Inc.
- Houlihan Lokey, Inc.
- Wells Fargo & Company
- Franklin Templeton Investments
- Vision Service Plan
- Intercare Holdings Insurance Services
- Liberty Mutual Holding Company Inc.
- Ryan Specialty Group, LLC
Government & education
The challenges facing educational and governmental institutions are particularly daunting because, while they have a human face, they nonetheless require straightforward, accessible, reliable and objective reporting. In times of shrinking resources, departments and agencies must plan for personnel and program changes; not to mention maintaining reporting systems by grant, program and department. Because personnel and support costs are often shared across these areas, reporting is further complicated. Our job is to help bring clarity to this sometimes chaotic picture and support more informed prioritization.
- Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
- Tennessee Valley Authority
- Idaho State Insurance Fund
- State of Utah
- University of California – Office of the President
- Northwestern University
- Georgia Tech Research Institute
- United States Air Force
Retail & consumer products
Faced with upward-first costs and logistics expenses while also being pinched by downward competitive pricing, retail companies are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain gross margins. To support strategic product-line, channel and customer-segment disposition decisions, they must allocate indirect and activity costs to each product and customer segment. Meanwhile, the cost savings centralization once provided has been eroded by the expense of expanded local presences required to meet customer demands for faster delivery. We specialize in building systems that process a huge amount of highly detailed data efficiently and accurately to support complex inventory management…and identify ways to improve turnover and ROI while at the same time supporting fewer stock-outs and higher fulfillment rates.
- Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Inc.
- Trinchero Family Estates (Sutter Home)
- Ghirardelli Chocolate Company
- Central Garden & Pet
- Patagonia
- Costco Wholesale Corporation
- Jamba Juice
- Sephora USA Inc.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is a demanding industry in the best of times. It is especially challenging during a protracted recovery, which can cause tax structure uncertainty, deferral of capital investments, weakening international demand or negative foreign currency translations. We can help in a number of areas. Operationally, manufacturers can leverage our analytics to improve margins by reducing less profitable product lines and channels, gain cost controls and productivity through lean manufacturing, and achieve efficiency through consolidated global sourcing. In financial areas, they may monitor and evaluate share-repurchase programs, debt reduction and strategic and balanced capital deployment. And, when it comes to logistics and production line strategy, our systems can also help improve tactics that impact customer satisfaction such as ship date versus promise date.
- Kelly-Moore Paints
- Daimler Trucks North America LLC
- Pentair Water Pool and Spa Inc.
- Lisi Aerospace
- VT Industries, Inc.
- Suncast Corporation
- WL Gore & Associates Inc.
- Mirion Technologies, Inc.
Distribution
Product distributors seek to maintain a high and cost effective inventory turnover rate while minimizing stock-outs and achieving a high order fulfillment rate. Our industry experts will help you set up a system that helps you forecast end-customer demand and product life cycles, as well as gross margin return on inventory investment and operational metrics on non-ships and customer returns. We’ll get your managers the insights they need to fine-tune inventory plans and minimize slow-movers and obsolescence.
- Straub Distributing Company, Ltd.
- Wagner Equipment Co.
- Aero Precision Industries, LLC
- McGrath RentCorp
- All Clear Aerospace and Defense
- Aperia Technologies
- Landstar System, Inc.
- Dole Fresh Vegetables
Biotech, life sciences & pharmaceuticals
Pharmaceutical, biotech and life science companies are getting squeezed like never before. Healthcare companies are imposing cost constraints and negotiating price discounts. Customers and healthcare payers are demanding new therapies that are clinically and economically better. Yet, while the costs of discovering and developing new drugs have soared, new drug productivity rates have essentially stalled for the past ten years. Allocating the costs associated with specific products and customers is, therefore, increasingly important to truly gauge profitability.
- Stryker Corporation
- Amyris, Inc.
- Genentech Inc.
- Medimpact Healthcare Systems Inc.
- Nature’s Sunshine Products, Inc.
- Abbott Laboratories
- Auris Surgical Robotics
- Bio-Rad
Software & internet
For software and internet companies, the expansion of solution developers and providers has spawned an extremely competitive environment complicated by an online distribution system under the constant threat of piracy and unpredictable revenue streams, including fluctuations in foreign currencies. Such challenges make accurate reporting and evaluation of discrete marketing programs and promotions particularly relevant for decisions about investments and expenses. From a user standpoint, we can help you implement self-service reporting and data visualization that will improve customer retention and increase profitability.
- Shutterfly
- Mozilla Corporation
- Intuit Inc.
- Nutanix
- Changepoint Corp.
- RingCentral Inc.
- Concur Technologies, Inc.
- Vindicia Inc.
Semiconductor
Customer demands for smaller, faster and cheaper chips plus accelerated product life cycles have pressured semiconductor makers to constantly reduce costs—despite rising R&D expenditures. The result is razor thin margins and the need to anticipate and forecast raw material and end-product needs more precisely. Getting caught with obsolete, intermediate-stage products or materials is an added risk. To improve business planning and maximize profitability, we’ll work with you to develop models that allocate material and process costs as well as staff activities by both product and customer.
- Micrel, Inc.
- Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (IDT)
- Silicon Image, Inc.
- Zoran Corporation
- Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.
- National Semiconductor Corporation
- Rambus Inc.
- Lattice Semiconductor
Utilities
The use of the data now provided by smart-grid investments to develop peak-sensitive rates has become a major challenge. Utility customers expect reliable service at reduced costs, while utility providers seek to smooth peak demand spikes and incentivize energy efficiency through better appliances and consumer behavior. Yet the potential ROI to be gained from smart grid investments must compete with other potential investments that could be made in storage capabilities at the generation, transmission, distribution and user locations. Thus, we offer capacity planning in overall budgeting and forecasting solutions.
- American Electric Power Company, Inc. (AEP)
- Chelan County Public Utility District
- Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
- Avista Corporation
- San Jose Water Company
- Arizona Public Service
- Pacific Gas & Electric Company
Real estate
The real estate development and operations industry must take a long view of financial cycles complicated by the life cycle of their buildings, evolving government requirements and management contracts. Planning and forecasting fixed assets, expenses and complicated balance sheets and cash flows over 20, 30 and 40 years challenges both the people and the software required to run such a business. We’ll work with you to build a solution to get a handle on this as well as evaluate competing demands and opportunities for incremental investments in existing or new projects. We understand portfolio management applications are as important as traditional financial systems.
- Kitchell CE
- Westfield Corporation
- Baird & Warner Real Estate
- Marcus & Millichap Inc.
- Fairfield Residential LLC
- Standard Interiors of Colorado
- Colony Capital, LLC
- CBRE Group Inc.
Media, entertainment & gaming
The constant pressure to do more with less—especially when it comes to marketing investment—has meant customer data has to be all the more revealing. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become increasingly important tools for evaluating the costs associated with attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. We’ll work with you to fine-tune such a analytics system that will help you identify potential and existing prospect segments, align those segments to retention efforts and budgets, manage loyalty programs, and fine-tune such programs to constantly improve their effectiveness.
- The Walt Disney Company
- San Francisco Symphony
- Cast & Crew Entertainment Services
- Green Builder Media, LLC
- SAGE Publications Inc.
- Oneida Tribe of Indians of WI (Oneida Casino)
- Key Curriculum Press
- American Merchandising Specialists, Inc.
Energy
Energy producers and distributors must reconcile rising public expectations and severe profit pressure. As demand for alternative energy sources soars, over-capacity and a fragmented, competitive landscape are virtually eliminating profit for suppliers. Fortunately, business analytics can help besieged managers. We can design productivity dashboards of production operations to allow comparison of staffing levels with output volumes and procurement costs (across multiple divisions) and significantly improve bottom lines. Such dashboards can also be used by retail operators to scrutinize profitability by channel and by service station—including tracking petroleum and non-petroleum products—and thus determine whether to close or renegotiate a particular station.
- Chevron Corporation
- Infineum US LP