Model-based Analysis of Purchase Orders
Ateleris developed a model-based analysis dashboard in Shiny/R to help Swisscom analyze and visualize purchase orders and get insights into their suppliers’ pricing structure.
Swisscom AG is a major telecommunications provider in Switzerland, offering a wide range of B2B and B2C services: from phone, internet, and mobile to digital media and streaming services.
With Swisscom AG purchasing specialists, Ateleris developed a purchase order and costing analysis tool in the statistics language R and an interactive drill-down and visualization dashboard in Shiny and Plotly.
In a proof of concept (POC), Ateleris used exploratory data science techniques to estimate the envisioned approach’s feasibility and potential on a subset of the purchase order data. After the successful evaluation of the PoC, Ateleris added the interactive analytics dashboard as a new component.
Firstly, the analysis tool reads and structures tens of thousands of single purchase orders and pulls additional external information. Secondly, all the (enriched) data are processed and analyzed using various data science techniques to build models representing the data in an analytical form. Lastly, the purchasing specialists could visualize the price development of purchased goods over time, and purchase amounts to detect price hikes and potential savings. The team successfully tested the tool with selected purchasing agents in several field tests.
To process and analyze the data, Ateleris engineered and implemented mathematical regression models and algorithms, as well as suitable drill-down and visualization techniques for the interactive dashboard.
Key Technologies/Terms
- Interactive dashboarding in Shiny/R and Plotly
- Model-based analysis, Regression modeling
- Exploratory data science and data wrangling
- Digital procurement / Business intelligence
Swisscom AG is a major telecommunications provider in Switzerland, offering a wide range of B2B and B2C services: from phone, internet, and mobile to digital media and streaming services.