Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In what kinds of disciplines are you seeing the maximum online adoption? Is it engineering, nursing, or business?

Todd Hitchcock: Traditionally, there has been a lot of growth in business and engineering. We see a tremendous amount of growth in healthcare professions. We see growth in degree programs that are associated directly with professions rather than traditional academic degrees – that may lead more to someone to move to pursue their PhD or more of an academic path. I see less growth in those currently than we do in degrees that are more aligned with what we consider professional degrees.

Sramana Mitra: I think one of the big drivers of online education especially for universities is that people are doing them in tandem with a job. Often, they’re enhancing their skills and trying to improve their career. You have to be professionally oriented.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Joe Shamir, CEO of ToolsGroup (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s say in the 10-year horizon we are seeing really significant adoption of still people-driven but a lot of data-driven behavior and optimization. It would be probably reasonable to say that in another 20 to 30 years, the people component will become less and less and everything becomes fully automated.

Joe Shamir: Certain processes will be fully automated. I have no doubt about it.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Joe Shamir, CEO of ToolsGroup (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to predict the horizon, what time frame are we talking about in which decisions will be driven by data – more scientifically as opposed to approximation?

Joe Shamir: It’s very hard to predict that. You have to be a social guru for that. Today, the phenomenon is driven from the consumer to the organization. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Joe Shamir, CEO of ToolsGroup (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Sounds like your customer base is largely in retail and consumer packaged goods. Is that accurate?

Joe Shamir: Yes, we are also in other verticals but this is the first verticals where you have this phenomena happening by nature of things. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Joe Shamir, CEO of ToolsGroup (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re basically using past promotions and modeling those past promotions in your machine learning algorithms to see how the behavior changes when you run certain kinds of promotions. When another promotion is being run in a similar geography by a similar channel partner, then you’re able to predict demand using those models.
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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Joe Shamir, CEO of ToolsGroup (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Joe, I’d like to do a couple of use cases because a lot of the things that we are talking about here are fairly complicated. The best thing to do is to just go through a couple of use cases. You can pick whatever customers best illustrate the concepts that we have discussed.

Joe Shamir: There is a huge investment today by all the consumer goods manufacturers in promotions. We are talking about business in the order of up to 30% of the gross revenue of these companies. It is a very large investment. It’s growing because their investment in media advertisement is growing. On the other hand, the impact that these promotions is generating has a very low accuracy and as a consequence, there are a very limited number of players and processes that are able to afford a reasonable return on investment.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Joe Shamir, CEO of ToolsGroup (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Since you have visibility on the supply chain side of the business, what are the key trends that you’re seeing in the Big Data applications and modeling?

Joe Shamir: By the fact that you’re moving closer to the consumer, you are collecting demand data as close as possible to the shelf or to the end consumer that is providing the transaction. As a consequence, the amount of data that is related to and all the attributes related to that specific demand is created by itself over a reasonable period of time in a Big Data scenario. The tendency of supply chains in the past was to keep things on an aggregate level – upstream and make global prediction and eventually push them downstream hoping for a better service to the customers. The recent evolution goes from traditional forecasting to a more sophisticated statistical processing and demand sensing down to collecting data as close as possible to end-consumer locations. This is the first trend that is happening. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Joe Shamir, CEO of ToolsGroup (Part 1)

Machines replacing humans. Similar to what Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfson point out in their article on the decoupling of productivity and job growth, Joe Shamir sheds some light on this trend of process automation within businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Joe, let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to ToolsGroup.

Joe Shamir: I’m Joe Shamir. I’m one of the founders of ToolsGroup. ToolsGroup has been operating in supply chain modeling, planning, and optimization for the last 20 years. We’ve achieved quite a deep coverage in terms of excellence in certain areas of the supply chain. We are currently serving 250 customers spanning all continents in about 32 countries.

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