Measuring employee engagement

Many companies wonder exactly how their investment in employee incentives and encouragement affect the bottom line. According to a recent Economist article by Scott Leibs, Best Buy found the answer by working out a system of metrics relating disparate parts of the organization. They quantified employee engagement through a simple scoring system and found that it correlated directly with operating income: every 10th of a point in engagement earned them an additional $100,000.

Pulse Meridian can help you measure relationships like these in your own business using such techniques as association rule mining, modeling, and standard statistics.

Unstructured data

In many organizations, a large fraction of relevant data isn't governed by the tidy schema of a database table. It is either unstructured or the structure is unknown (think documents, web content, email, etc.). Not surprisingly, this is the hardest type of data for most business intelligence software to analyze.

However, effectively analyzing unstructured data is vital for many companies. According to the Associated Press, companies like Eastman Kodak scour patent filings (their own and competitors') for connections. NACCO Industries scans tens of thousands of warranty claims and service reports for patterns that might reveal defects in their manufacturing process. Responding early can stave off a flood of returned products.

Analyzing unstructured data is Pulse Meridian's expertise. We're intimately familiar with a large body of cutting edge literature providing scalable techniques for finding patterns in data that doesn't fit into the relational model.

What customers want

The famous correlation between sales of diapers and beer was uncovered by Tesco, the largest retailer in Britain, Cecilie Rohwedder tells us in The Wall Street Journal. What else would you expect from new fathers who can't make it to the bar?

Tesco's Clubcard program provides them data on their customer's shopping habits, allowing them to target advertising and carry special product lines tailored to their clientèle. They found price conscious shoppers appreciated cheaper staples, like butter, while more affluent customers looked for fine wines and cheese.

Pulse Meridian can uncover patterns in your customer's buying habits just like these. These insights let you improve customer satisfaction and increase sales.

Product recommendations

A New York Times article by Laurie Flynn mentioned that NetFlix recommendations account for two-thirds of the movies rented from their web site. They employ relatively sophisticated mechanisms for sifting through their 38,000 films to find the ones suited to the viewing tastes of each customer.

Pulse Meridian's experience with collaborative filtering goes back nearly a decade. We are familiar with recent advances in the field, but can also suggest and optimize existing approaches.

The science of markdowns

An article by Amy Merrick in The Wall Street Journal reports ShopKo experimented with software designed to compute exactly when and how much items should be marked down to move the merchandise before it became irrelevant. The software surprisingly revealed the common technique of small but frequent markdowns led to unnecessary labor costs and little return. Instead, one or two well-timed markdowns could generate much more revenue while still depleting seasonal stocks.

Armed with statistical models generated from your company's internal data, Pulse Meridian can reach conclusions like this one for your business. Our background in mathematics and optimization gives us the perfect faculties for solving such problems.