The power of data to drive superior performance and competitive advantage has been proven across industries and business functions. From finance to marketing and from operations to human resources, data is prevalent and is increasingly a key ingredient for success.

But that data is valuable to your business only to the degree that it has been turned into intelligence, such as:

  • Actionable intelligence to help you make better decisions
  • Reliable intelligence capabilities to improve and automate business processes
  • Innovative products and services powered by intelligence to server your customers

Very often delivering the desired business results requires not just buying a fancy AI product or a BI tool. It requires a collaboration between functional experts and data science and engineering experts that have honed their skill over many years of practical application.

If you are looking for:

  • a highly collaborative partner with a proactive attitude
  • one that is an expertly focused on the “intelligence disciplines” (data science, data engineering, statistics, business intelligence, machine learning, artificial intelligence)
  • one that has long-standing record of applying those disciplines to solve numerous questions and problems, across various industries and business areas
  • one that will not just sell you a “product” or a “platform” but understand your real objectives and help you find (or develop) practical and effective solutions

then Proactive Ingredient is a good fit!

Our Firm

We are a specialized boutique consulting firm dedicated to help clients improve business results, optimize processes and tactics, or create innovative products and services by applying data science, business intelligence, and artificial intelligence.

Our expert talent has a track record of launched intelligence products and delivered business results across many industries and business areas including:

  • B2B Marketing
  • Contract Pricing
  • Product Development
  • Workforce Planning & Human Capital Analytics
  • Operations Management
  • Facilities Management
  • Process Improvement & Automation
  • Cost Benchmarking & Cost Reduction
  • Energy Management
  • Commercial Real Estate
  • Transportation
  • Technology

We are flexible and will adapt to your needs and requirements. Whether your company is starting a BI or AI initiative from scratch or you just need additional resources to work alongside your existing team to grow your current capabilities, we can partner with you.

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End-to-end Business Intelligence services meeting you where you are

Superior business intelligence hasn’t appeared yet at the press of a magic button and it rarely comes from products or vendors that apply cookie-cutter approaches.

Business applications often come with embedded analytics and sometimes these features are good enough. But many other times they don’t provide the actionable insights you need, leave important questions open, lack the most important business metrics, exist disconnected (or misaligned) from other systems, are focused on the past, are not optimized for your real-world scenarios, lack transparency, among other issues.

We believe that superior Business Intelligence:

  • Starts with understanding your goals, context, and pain points
  • Seeks to work with the applications and the data that you have – it’s not about selling and implementing products
  • If additional data needs to be collected or processes need to be optimized, it follows a very focused and agile process
  • Applies rigorous data science and statistics to make sure the insights and actionable recommendations are reliable

We can serve your firm wherever it is, at any stage of the BI lifecycle, including:

  • understanding company needs and formulating a business intelligence strategy and roadmap
  • evaluating and selecting a data platform and BI tech stack
  • implementing the tools and technology in production from ELT, warehousing and governance to visualization and mining
  • helping build a BI team in your organization or becoming capacity augmentation for your existing expert team
  • mining your data to find answers or to generate insights and recommendations for decision support
  • executing, measuring, and optimizing programs and tactics across segments
  • developing self-service dashboards and decision support solutions for your executives and power users
  • mining your process data to understand what’s happening, check conformance, measure performance, identify opportunities, and measure the impact of process improvements
  • bringing to bear the entire data science toolkit (descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics) for your BI
  • maintaining legacy solutions (for example SAS) and if needed migrating them to your new stack

Please reach out if you want to learn more or to discuss how business intelligence may help your company.

Artificial Intelligence capabilities tailored to your needs

Recent advances in AI are nothing short of revolutionary and will change many of our jobs and industries. These times can feel very exciting or very concerning – and perhaps having both is the right response. In either case, history suggests that the technology is here to stay and will continue to improve.

Unfortunately, the results that one gets out of the box, even from models from firms producing the most advanced research, can be underwhelming at times. Once one starts to use the Generative AI products or the foundational AI models in real-world scenarios, it becomes clear that they have biases and gaps. Some organizations react by dismissing or even banning the use of AI. Other organizations are seeking to make sensible and adequate use of AI. The later ones have the potential to gain a massive competitive advantage.

We propose that it is possible to sensibly and adequality use AI/ML to gain competitive advantage by:

  • Understanding that it’s not AI alone – it’s about designing and implementing business capabilities enabled by people, process, technology, and AI/ML/Data Science.
  • Going through a future business capability brainstorming and road mapping process
  • Prioritizing proof of concept and MVP projects for a key future business capabilities powered by AI/ML
  • When it comes to applying AI/ML, considering the entire array of options:
    • Doing AI with or without HITL (humans in the loop).
    • Focusing on algorithms and/or focusing on data.
    • Using foundational models, fine-tunning foundations models, or developing your own ML models.
    • Using prompt engineering.
  • Follow best practices in data science, Data Ops, and MLOps along the way

Our firm has been testing and using ChatGPT (and its APIs) since day one and even though the output is not always perfect, it can be effectively channeled to generate enormous efficiencies and create new capabilities successfully.

We can help your firm at various stages:

  • from discussing opportunities in your industry to launching new capabilities as bets to change it
  • from a quick proof of concept to launching and operating production-grade intelligence solutions
  • from bringing us to start your first AI initiative to using us as capacity augmentation in existing projects
  • understanding company needs and formulating an AI capability roadmap
  • understand your customer pain points or process pain points and determine how AI-based capabilities may help solve them
  • implementing AI-enabled proofs of concept and MVP solutions
  • grow you AI pilots into scalable and robust production applications
  • automate processes with AI and NLP (with or without HITL)
  • develop, validate, deploy, monitor, and improve machine-learning models
  • implement MLOps technology and best practices

Our services

We offer a variety of advisory and implementation services:

  • Your “Fractional” Chief Analytics Officer: Small and medium firms may hire a senior leader on a part-time basis to help shape their analytics organizations and bring best practices. This officer can help frame your BI and AI strategy, hold ideation or capability planning workshops, build your team with a focus on results, find the BI/AI technology that best fits your needs, establish quality-assurance procedures, define the DataOps and MLOps procedures, and manage through change. The role can be flexibly deployed following the organization structure that best fits your needs. It can act as an outside advisor or be embedded in your organization with a set level of accountability.
  • Your Business Intelligence Technical Partners: Implementation services to turn the data you have into insights, benchmarks, and forecasts that will help you make better business decisions and optimize your programs. This could include the extraction, transformation, loading, analysis and validation of data. This could include the development of self-service dashboards for you and your team to use.
  • Your Artificial Intelligence Development Partners: Implementation services to apply the latest AI models and AI services from cloud providers to optimize or automate your processes and create innovative products. Find the best approach (focus on algorithms, focus on data, reuse large foundational models, fine-tune them if needed, or create your own, validate always to ensure adequate quality.)
  • Your Data & Technology Partners: Implementation services to modernize the analytics stack and data platforms. For example, migrating your data to an MPP Cloud Datawarehouse, implementing a Data Science & ML cloud environment for your team, helping you evaluate and select a BI platform, among other types of analytics infrastructure projects.

Concrete Examples: With what types of projects can help you?

  • Optimization of Marketing, Pricing, Operations, or Human Capital programs.
  • Development of intelligence capabilities, technology products, and data-driven solutions.
  • Analytics: Rigorous statistical analysis and measurement. Extracting sound insights from data for decision support.
  • Advisory on AI/BI strategies, technologies, and architectures.
  • Staffing: Help setup or augment intelligence teams.
  • Technology: Help evaluate, implement, and integrate data platforms and BI/AI tools.
  • Modernization and Upgrade: Help as an implementation partner to adopt leading AI products (such as ChatGPT), leading data platforms, leading analytics engineering tools, among numerous other technologies that are raising the bar.

In terms of application areas, here are some examples of projects and services that we can provide:

  • Marketing Analytics: Market and customer segmentation, targeting with predictive response models, planning and optimization of cross-channel marketing campaigns, scientific attribution of revenue, ROI analysis, churn analytics, design of experiments (testing and learning), look-alike modeling, among other.
  • Pricing Analytics: Analysis of price or price-structure changes, statistical modeling of pricing for simple or complex contracts, implementing fair-price modeling to rationalize discounting, and other price optimization services.
  • Human Capital Analytics: Workforce planning analytics, workforce forecasting and simulation for decision support, employee experience analytics including analysis of survey comments, employee retention and drivers of attrition, predictive analytics for critical roles (strategic planning) or positions (succession planning), and analytics to support HR functions such as talent acquisition, talent management, diversity and inclusion, compensation, among other.
  • Operations Analytics: Analytics for process improvement, AI for process (with or without humans in the loop), real-time AI to set financial controls and drive savings, optimize resource allocations, optimize routes and waypoints, etc.
  • Commercial Real Estate Analytics: Lease-cost benchmarking, energy utilization models, Facility Management analytics, maintenance-cost benchmarking, among other areas.
  • Other Areas: The Data Science methods are highly transferable to other domains, so if you work in a different field and are looking for someone experienced in bringing AI or BI technologies to a different issue or a brand-new area of application, that is us, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Contact us to learn more about any of these services.

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