{"id":33709,"date":"2020-01-24T13:08:11","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T18:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/?p=33709"},"modified":"2020-02-11T11:54:52","modified_gmt":"2020-02-11T16:54:52","slug":"fiu-business-analytics-students-find-the-intersection-of-data-and-dahlias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/2020\/01\/fiu-business-analytics-students-find-the-intersection-of-data-and-dahlias\/","title":{"rendered":"FIU Business analytics students find the intersection of data and dahlias."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Workers
Workers at Falcon Farms<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What do flowers and big data have in common? Quite a lot, it turns out. That is what graduate students of Lina Bouayad, assistant professor of information systems and business analytics, discovered when focusing the power of multiple databasets on the sale of blooms.<\/p>\n

Students in the Master of Science in Information Systems<\/a> program were asked to find data sets that might help Falcon Farms, a flower business with regional headquarters in Miami, fine-tune its decision-making. For example, when should the firm ship roses, or, should bouquets at one store feature white lilies, while those at another might lean toward blue delphiniums.<\/p>\n

\"Lina
Lina Bouayad<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe had to look up all these flowers and see how they are used,\u201d Bouayad said. \u201cSome of the results, conclusions and recommendations were very interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

The blossom investigation was both the program\u2019s capstone project and an ATOM<\/a> undertaking. ATOM, which stands for Analytics, Technology Consulting and Operations Management, is FIU Business\u2019s first faculty technology consulting service, launched in 2015.<\/p>\n

ATOM tackles the challenges businesses are having which might be helped by applying the insights that data analysis provides.<\/p>\n

In this project, students were given historical sales data from Flower Farm Inc. and free reign to search out which kind of quantified or quantifiable information might correlate with flower demand rise-and-fall.<\/p>\n

At issue: the company was using historical sales data to forecast future sales. But its 80 percent accuracy rate needed fine-tuning. Flowers are highly perishable, and a miscalculation might mean products wilting on the shelves and revenue that couldn\u2019t be recouped, Bouayad explained.<\/p>\n

Bouayad encouraged students, divided up into teams of four or five, to think innovatively when seeking information. Datasets selected and scraped online by the students included stock market prices, oil prices and snowfall in Alaska (one of the farm\u2019s markets). Other datasets included information gleaned from governments, such as employment data, and recorded marriages, births and deaths.<\/p>\n

Students also brought in Twitter data, which revealed likes and dislikes.<\/p>\n

\"Workers
Workers at Falcon Farms<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Merging the proprietary sales data and external data. <\/em><\/p>\n

At project\u2019s end, the students presented their conclusions to the flower farm\u2019s owner. For example, the team that correlated the Dow Jones average with sales saw a sales increase eight days after a stock hike \u2013 just about how long it takes for gains to be realized in many investor accounts. And the Alaska data showed that heavy snowfall meant decreased sales as people stayed off the roads.<\/p>\n

Falcon leadership was impressed with what the students achieved. \u201cIt is critically important to forecast sales \u2013 what you put into the store gets sold or thrown away,\u201d said Felipe Arango, director of new business development at the company. \u201cThe students were very curious and intuitive about what could be explanatory variables.\u201d What proved most useful, he said, was the correlation of sales data with weather conditions. \u201cWe have integrated it into our model. So far it has proven very useful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The project also marked the first time students on an ATOM project had presented remotely.<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks to the current technology, the process went very smoothly,\u201d Bouayad said. \u201cThe client had a split view of the slides, and the students presenting. He was able to ask questions and provide comments after each presentation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were so motivated,\u201d Bouayad said of the students. \u201cThey were really engaged.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of those students was Guillermo Planos, founder of software company, Webvoz, which allows for the sonic transfer of data, a new and upcoming technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was fantastic,\u201d said Planos about the project. \u201cWe basically searched for causality, that is where the brainstorming came in.\u201d Using\u00a0public\u00a0census data, his team correlated neighborhoods,\u00a0county fairs and events schedules, store locations and even age, income\u00a0and ethnicity with sales.<\/p>\n

The more data that is obtained, Planos said, the better algorithmic predictions would become. Traditional methods \u2013 just looking at historical sales data \u2013 is like driving a car and only looking in the rear view mirror, he said. But with today\u2019s data analytic methods, \u201cone can see what is coming around the bend.\u201d<\/p>\n

Planos said that the remote presentation kept everyone\u2019s attention. \u201cWe knew that the full collaborative resources of (the classroom) were playing in orchestrated synchronization,\u201d he said, adding that audio and visual blending created a compelling experience.<\/p>\n

In the end, the project, he said, showed \u201chow external data analysis could bring insights to decision making for products as simple as flowers sold in a supermarket.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do flowers and big data have in common? Quite a lot, it turns out. That is what graduate students of Lina Bouayad, assistant professor of information systems and business analytics, discovered when focusing the power of multiple databasets on the sale of blooms. Students in the Master of Science in Information Systems program were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":33721,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[3901,4139],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33709"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33709"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33727,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33709\/revisions\/33727"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}