Many companies are sitting on a precious treasure, without suspecting it. What is meant are not forgotten boxes full of gold or silver, but unused, large amounts of big data that hide important, business-relevant information. Provided you filter the data appropriately and combine and interpret it correctly. To recognize these hidden Big Data potentials in companies and to use for business cases, PwC trains hierarchical and cross-divisional coworkers in the in-house Data Analytics Academy. With impressive results, as the case of David Benjamin Lecomte, Senior Consultant at PwC, shows, he and his team, through the Intelligent Pooling of previously unused data, developed a solution for auditing large parts of the hospitality industry through the Data Analytics Academy Could be use.
Graduate in Business Administration Lecomte has been working in the Examining Division of PwC since 2012 and – prior to attending the approximately four-week Data Analytics Academy – did not have an explicit IT background or data preparation skills with Big Data Analytics tools. “But the Data Analytics Academy is not about training IT leaders. Employees who, like me, have more of a business background know the concrete needs of their customers very well. Therefore, it makes sense to sensitize us to how data analysis methods can add value to companies, “says Lecomte, stressing that his approach to digital technologies has been sustainably improved thanks to the Academy as a whole. “When I get a new mandate today and see a lot of digital big data, I think about it: what problem could be solved with this information and what digital tools are available to me?”
About every three months, PwC runs a Data & Analytics Academy that spans several weeks. In the first four weeks, participants will receive multiple virtual training sessions in advanced big data analysis tools and a full day of training to deepen their insights. Of course, the practical implementation of what has been learned must not be missed: After the learning phase, the participants have four weeks to work on their specific business case.
Lecomte and his team of five dedicated themselves in the use cases of their Academy to a well-known fast food restaurant chain. “The company is a longtime PwC audit client, and we knew that they would not realize the full potential of their data,” explains Lecomte. After implementing a contemporary visualization of the existing big data in the first step, the group focused on a problem that all fast food restaurants have: the verification of VAT rates. Depending on whether a customer eats to go or in the restaurant, a reduced seven percent VAT or full rate applies. “The tax office often doubts the sales of such chains and suspects that the employees book more to-go food than is actually ordered. A huge topic in the industry, “says Lecomte
