At the workshop, you’ll team up with three to five other participants to compete against other groups. In an initial briefing, you’ll find out about Future Chips International, a fictitious producer of electronic components that markets three different products in three separate regions around the world. Your task during the Business Analytics Experience Workshop is to lead this company to success. You have all of the past three years’ business data at your disposal, at different aggregation levels, giving you a detailed picture of the company’s history.

Next, you’ll set your targets, analyze the opportunities and risks for FCI’s products in different markets, identify what steps need to be taken, and plan your actions. A specially trained coach will guide you through your analyses and decision-making, and help you work hands-on with the business analytics solutions. As you progress through the workshop activities, you’ll rapidly become familiar with the basic functionality of IBM business analytics tools. You’ll work with a variety of reports, discover the power of the information in the highly aggregated key indicators provided, and analyze data at different levels of detail and from different angles. You’ll then set target budgets in your planning solution based on the decisions you’ve discussed and finalized with your fellow team members.

After that, we’ll run a simulation to determine the quarterly results for the business, based on the internal and external parameters you define. The next cycle will begin with an analysis of the results from the past quarter and the defining of the parameters for the next quarter.

During the workshop, you’ll focus on making decisions concerning FCI’s finance, marketing and sales strategies and tactics. The highly realistic simulation lets you see how business decisions in your department will affect the outcomes of the other departments.



Here are some examples of the decisions you’ll be making in the workshops: