DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab

Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

Analytical Consulting Lab Candidate Projects Winter 2011

Welcome the Analytical Consulting Lab!

In the following pages, you will find candidate projects from sponsoring companies under the Analytical Consulting Lab (DECS 915) for Winter 2011.

The projects listed include working with actual company data, developing meaningful analytical models for managerial decision-making, and presenting results and recommendations to company executives. Most projects will require some level of Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with the sponsoring company.

More information about the class can be found at its website: http://kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/walker/htm/acl/

Please feel free to contact me at 847 467 2148 or [email protected] with any questions and interest

Thanks for your interest.

Russell Walker, Ph.D. Associate Director of the Zell Center for Risk Research Kellogg School of Management Northwestern University Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

Groupon www.groupon.com Candidate Project

“Analyzing the Groupon Loyalty Program”

Groupon is a start-up advertising portal that focuses on bringing together advertisers and consumers through a unique coupon mechanism that leverages a web portal, e-mail, and social networking. It was started in Chicago and is flourishing across many cities. Kellogg students have explored the role of hyper users in this social network and the phenomena of no-purchase members. The work with Groupon will continue this study and include an emphasis on the loyalty program.

The project is sponsor by the founders and the executive team at Groupon. Students on this project should get their Groupon! Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

Turbo Tax Social Network Analysis www.turbotax.com www.IBM.com Candidate Project

“Mining the TurboTax Live Social Community for Customer Insights”

SPSS is a leading analytics and data mining software provider that has advanced tools in unstructured learning including text mining. SPSS was acquired by IBM this year. This project is sponsored by Stephen Gold, head of R&D at IBM SPSS and involves a major client, Inuit Turbo Tax with.

Project Description

Live Community:

TurboTax Live Community (see https://ttlc.intuit.com/app/full_page) is a social network application where customers can learn and share with other TurboTax Online (see http://www.turbotax.com) users while preparing their taxes. As users step through each TurboTax screen, they can view contextual relevant questions and answers on the right side of the screen. Users contribute to Live Community by asking questions, answering questions or providing comments, and voting on answers.

In TurboTax Live Community, the community knowledge is being shared and accessed at the right time and the right place because questions are being asked and answered by people who have gone through the same path. Furthermore, the questions and answers are being presented and ranked by various matrixes including users’ social behaviors like voting, rating and viewing. Beyond this, these user behaviors are being applied to Live Community search technologies, such that when users ‘search’ or ‘ask questions’ Live Community can recommend answers before they are submitted. Since its launch in 2007 the TurboTax Live Community has helped more than 7 million unique customers get free, contextually relevant answers to their tax questions, all while creating a better customer experience than traditional help channels deliver. In 2010 year alone, there have been 27 million Q&A views in the community, 445K questions, and 380K replies.

Project Goals: Live Community is a unique source of structured and unstructured data on TurboTax customer behavior that remains largely untapped. The potential tasks of interest for the SMART initiative will likely include: Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

 Detection unusual activity in TurboTax (e.g. software bugs and system failure) by mining Live Community text (e.g. question, comments) and social feedbacks (views, votes) data.

 Detection of positive and negative customer feedbacks linked to TurboTax interview screens by sentiment analysis of Live Community text data.

 Detection of new TurboTax feature requests and suggestions by mining Live Community text data.

Element Bars www.ElementBars.com

About We are a custom energy bar company located in Chicago. This means that at http://www.ElementBars.com, customers can create their own custom energy bar by selecting from all natural and organic ingredients and then naming their own bar. Our whole food ingredients are carefully handpicked and kept as nature intended. Then we hand make our bars using the ingredients our customers choose, bake them in our ovens and deliver them freshly baked from our ovens to their doors.

The Founder and CEO Jonathan Miller and VP of Marketing Prasanthi Gandhi are both Kellogg alums from the Class of 2008. They have worked with several students from Kellogg – including hiring summer interns and serving as clients for other class projects. The Analytical Consulting Lab provides another great opportunity to provide students with rewarding experiences while allowing Element Bars to leverage student skills. Below are 3 projects of interest.

Project 1

“Building the Best Customer Bar” In addition to custom bars, we recommend ‘our favorite recipes’ to customers. These are bars that are pre-made and proven in taste and nutrition. We would like to revise ‘our favorites’ using a data driven approach. The main question to be answered is ‘what favorite recipes are recommended for our customers and what simple changes in ingredients can be made to the favorite recipes to also have greatest appeal to our customers’? The recommendation should be based on both customer interest and cost of ingredients. Additional sub-questions are provided below: • What flavors are customers asking for in their bars? Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

• What ingredients drive repeat rate and do not drive repeat rate? • What ingredients cluster together? • What core + ingredients are being requested by customers? The data we can provide includes shopping cart, ingredients/bars purchased, price of ingredients, and customer ratings.

Project 2

“Marketing in Action: Analyzing Customer Behavior for Insights” We are interested in measuring intended behavior both online and offline for the purposes of customer acquisition, conversion, and retention efforts. Therefore we would like to know the likelihood of different outcomes such as 1) purchase, 2) repeat purchase, 3) signing up for a subscription, 4) choosing to go with a competitor, 5) signing up (our ending) our various services (i.e. newsletter, social media), 6) buying a gift, 7) responding to a discount, 8) responding to a promotion or offer, 9) buying a new product, and 10) being a high-value customer. The data we can provide includes purchase behavior, service subscriptions, and historical promotions and new product launches.

Project 3

“Providing Analytically Driven Web Offers” In our research we found that guidance is a critical service we need to provide to our customers. As such, we are interested in building out taste guidance on our website. This can be done by providing suggestions based on similar customer profiles. These suggestions can then be offered as customers are adding ingredients into their cart or as part of our pre-made bar creations. We need to know what are the different customer profiles and what kind of taste suggestions can we offer new and existing customers. The data we can provide is customer research on texture, taste and nutrition.

Students may also work on aspects of these three projects. Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

William Blair and Co. www.williamblair.com Candidate Project The following project is available with William Blair and Co., the largest investment bank in Chicago. Projects are sponsored by Scott Stevens, William Blair executive and Kellogg EMP alumnus.

“Evaluating the performance of companies who institute stock buybacks”

Analyze the relative performance of those companies who announce buybacks over the short term and long term. Is there any variation in performance based upon (i) the type of buyback (tender offer, Dutch auction, open market, etc.) or (ii) the amount of shares actually bought back relative to amount initially authorized. Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

United Airlines www.United.com

Candidate Projects There are multiple candidate projects with United Airlines and the Mileage Plus frequent flyer program. The projects will generally involve a study of customer redemption, reward use, search use and Internet tracking, and partner involvement. The Mileage Plus program is an internationally recognized rewards program of premier status. Student teams will work on real projects, with real data, and present to senior executives. These projects are sponsored by Krishnan Saranathan, VP of Enterprise Optimization at United and a Kellogg alumnus and Susan Parrington, who has overseen previous ACL projects with Kellogg.

Project #1: “Analyzing E-Mail Engagement and Opt-out by Customers.”

Objectives:  Develop new engagement metric, and recommend ways to reduce number of members opting out from e-mail messages

 Evaluate the patterns of e-mail contact at member level, for different segments of MP members

 Investigate the patterns of EM receipt, open, click at member level

 Look at relationship between number of e-mails sent and open click rates and unsubscribing for different categories of MP members

 Look at relationship between number of e-mails sent and unsubscribe (at member level, not by campaign)– is there some way to reduce unsubscribers?

 Propose an individual metric for “e-mail engagement”. Current metric has limited use – only identifies “Tuned out” members.

Project #2: “Exploring Drivers behind Mileage Plus Redemption and Cashing Out”

Objectives: Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

 Determine prevalence of “Cashing out” and predict who is most likely to cash out, in order to avoid presenting those members with easy opportunities to cash out

 Look at redemption patterns for individuals

 Try to identify instances where member has redeemed most of remaining balance and is not likely to earn any more

 Develop a score to predict the likelihood that a person will cash out, or a metric that if they redeem, they are likely to cash out. Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

Northrop Grumman

www.northropgrumman.com Candidate Project The candidate projects are sponsored by Tim Carone, Ph.D. Director, Global Climate Monitoring Systems Advanced Programs & Technology Division, and an alumnus of various Kellogg executive programs.

Project Descriptions

Project 1 “Ubiquitous Retail Information”

Overview – using panchromatic data (e.g., the data used in Google Earth) it is possible to count cars in a parking lot of a retail store and relate those counts to financial metrics such as quarterly earnings. Far richer data can be obtained with remote sensing techniques. Remote sensing data obtained by aircraft and satellites which can obtain data such as the number of cars in store parking lot, the make/model/age of each car and its license plate; heat output from a store; sound levels from a store; how often a car returns; the locus of the origin of the cars and which direction they might have come; if cars from one retail location frequent nearby retail locations; and so on. It should be possible to link basic images of stores, customer traffic and store immediate surroundings to more financial metrics than just quarterly earnings. Objectives – the goal of this work is to determine metrics, derived from more advanced remote sensing data instead of that derived from Google Earth panchromatic data, that provide unambiguous information on a the performance of retail stores. These metrics should be currently unattainable using Google Earth or other existing applications. Data and Information Needed – the class will need a primer on remote sensing that Northrop Grumman can provide. Outcomes – A list of metrics that describe the local environment of retail stores that can be obtained using remote sensing techniques and be tied to financial performance for a store.

Project 2 “Climate Intelligence for Industrial Sectors”

Overview – today’s climate data collection is optimized for the 33 essential climate variables that are used for global climate models by the scientific community. It is not obvious that any of these variables would be useful for commercial industries to measure their risk as it relates to climate, energy and water issues. Companies are being subjected to regulations that require them to do more than pay lip service to climate change, the costs and impacts of using non-renewable energy sources and their use of water. The private sector needs information to Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

help them manage their risks yet no one has yet defined an optimal set of essential climate variables for them. Objectives – the goal of this work is to define the first set of essential climate variables for the business community. These variables would be optimized for use by the commercial sector in their risk models. This work should also include guidance on how to use the variables for several specific risk models. Data and Information Needed – a primer will be needed on climate science, the climate variables and remote sensing which will acquaint the students with the basics of how data is obtained. Outcomes – a list of business metrics that are derived from new (and possibly existing) essential climate variables. These metrics would allow companies to manage their risk associated with climate change, energy changes and water changes. Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

Shoppertrak www.shoppertrak.com

About:

ShopperTrak is a Chicago-based company that through proprietary camera technology, provides retailers an ability to measure traffic at stores. When combining such traffic data with in-stores sales data and labor data, very interesting and powerful management metrics can be consider. Retailers and other real estate constituents can take a view on what options are best for sales growth and what real estate use if best.

For over 18 years, ShopperTrak has evolved into the world's premier provider of traffic based management solutions. The following are significant milestones in ShopperTrak's history:

1992-1995 ShopperTrak (then "Datatec") made its first sale of a traffic measurement video device. Tradition of investment in technological advancement led to continuous improvement in accuracy and reliability.

1996-2002 ShopperTrak rolled out the industry's first embedded counting system called "Orbit". In 2001, ShopperTrak merged with the leader in mall installations, RCT Systems, Inc. The newly formed company immediately became the industry's leading provider of information that helps companies that depend on pedestrian traffic to better understand their customers. In 2002, ShopperTrak released its "Orbit 3", combining embedded counting technology with remote diagnostics and System Management Services including the ability to validate counting through remotely scheduled recordings.

2003-2006 ShopperTrak launched its Professional Services division, the company's consulting arm that develops and implements strategies that help organizations make better business decisions based on key traffic data. They continued to expand globally by first establishing new distributor offices in Dubai, U.A.E.; Wollongong, Australia; and Taipei, Taiwan and then a year later, opening another global office in Shenzhen, China. Also that same year, ShopperTrak released its new Orbit 5 technology, utilizing two on- board video sensors with high speed processing components to unobtrusively track customers' movements.

Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

2007-2008 ShopperTrak counted customer traffic in over 55,000 locations in 65 countries worldwide. They continued their global expansion by establishing their first distributor relationship in South America with Virtual Gate in Brazil. Today, ShopperTrak is the largest global traffic measurement company in the market today. We have installed over 60,000 traffic counting sensors in 74 countries and count an estimated 13 billion worldwide shopping visits a year.

Projects with ShopperTrak are sponsored by the CEO, Christopher Ainsley and his direct reports. Katie Twohy, a Kellogg alum has joined the ShopperTrak team and will also be advising the ACL team.

ShopperTrak will sponsor only one of the following projects, to be selected by the Kellogg team.

Project #1: “Retail In-store Sales Staff Management”

Using aggregated retail sales and labor data, this project will evaluate important metrics such as sales earned per labor spent. The goal of this project is to determine “best” labor deployment conditions for retail stores, realizing that additional labor does contribute to increased sales, but that at some point diminishing returns are experienced for marginal labor additions. The output of this model will be useful to various types of retailers, suggesting optimal staffing models to sales management.

Project #2 “Real Estate Management Using Retail Traffic Data”

From the perspective of a real estate landlord, information on revenue generated from the real estate is mostly difficult to acquire. Such information would be immensely valuable in setting and managing rents for commercial tenants. In the context of shopping malls, pairing traffic data on malls with revenue data on stores within the models provides a view on the revenue per square foot of the mall (an immensely interesting metric for real estate developers). This project will focus on metrics and products for the mall real estate market.

Project #3 “In Store Pattern Recognition” Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

As ShopperTrak has over 5 years of data on retail outlets, there is a need to mine this data for patterns that might suggest when stores are beginning to fail, to determine peak hours for shopping in certain parts of the country, or other interesting customer/shopping realities of retail data. The goal is to look at the data from a very wide angle, while like looking for over-arching trends that can be used to enhance retail operations universally. Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

THE CME GROUP www.CME.com Candidate Project The candidate project with CME is sponsored by Christopher Mead, Director at CME and Kellogg EMP alumnus and Jake Siddall, Kellogg alumnus. Students may select one of the following projects.

Project Descriptions Project 1: “Modeling Market Volumes”

This project will look at capacity planning for mission-critical trading systems at the CME. A Kellogg team has explored some of the market drivers that describe trading volume, including macro-economic realities, market conditions, and commodity interests. The goal of the project is to create a model or algorithm that can accurately predict the expected amount of output (known as “Market Data”) based on a set amount of incoming messages (“Order Entry Data”). The “Market Data” takes on one form while the “Order Entry Data” takes on several. This means that many inputs generate a limited number of outputs. The work previously done on this project give a solid base with which to start and the project is able to be viewed in many ways – the group can put it together in whatever way they feel will give the manager the best decision making ability.

Project 2: “Floor” vs “Electronic” As markets have evolved the CME has evolved. What was once an “all floor” based trading model is now much more hybrid system with “floor” and “electronic” markets trading at the same time. The goal of this initiative is to compare prices and liquidity in the two different environments. This project will look at Eurodollars and S&P Eminis and how these products respond differently on the “floor” versus the “electronic” venues. The goal of this project is to support or debunk the statement that different markets are easier to trade on one venue over another. This will be done by specifically evaluating if there is a substantial difference between trades price, bid/offer, and volumes from the “floor” to the “electronic” markets.

Project 3: “The Validity of “Request For Quote” (RFQ)” The Request for Quote model at the CME is one of cause and effect. A electronic notification to the market (known as a RFQ) is expect to generate liquidity in the instrument that is being notified. However, this is not always the case as RFQs are at times seen as “abusing.” This project will take a closer look at this statement and attempt to look for a relation between RFQ usage and the robustness of the markets and the reverse (the relation of market robustness and RFQ usage). Here Eurodollar options and S&P Emini options will be used to build a predictive association between the use of RFQs and the liquidity of the market. Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

Social Compact www.socialcompact.org

Candidate Projects The following projects are available with Social Compact, a not-for-profit organization to provides economic analysis on low-income communities for the purpose of invite investment by retailers, banks, grocery stores, pharmacies, and the like. These projects are sponsored by Carolina Valencia, Director of Research and Development for Social Compact. The project is also sponsored by Clark Abrahams who is a member of the Board of Directors for Social Compact and advises on its use analysis to make compelling and honest statements about the economic vibrancy of communities otherwise overlooked.

More on Social Compact:

Social Compact is a coalition of business leaders from across the country who are promoting successful business investment in lower-income communities for the benefit of current residents.

For years, Social Compact sponsored the highly competitive and prestigious Social Compact Awards that recognized successful business performance and investment in America's under- served neighborhoods. Social Compact is now further leveraging its leadership's combined business expertise to address some of the key impediments to private investment in inner-city communities, namely, negative stereotypes – reinforced by poverty and deficiency data coupled with a lack of dependable business-oriented market information -- and an absence of effective inner-city market analysis models.

Social Compact addresses these issues through its inner-city neighborhood market analysis, the DrillDown, and through municipal and community trainings and consulting, and contributions to community development innovation.

List of Projects

1. “Los Angeles Neighborhood Banking Analysis”

As part of the its commitment to demonstrating the economic opportunities in lower- income neighborhoods, Social Compact has polled over 1800 families in three distinct predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The data includes information on personal banking preferences, reliance on wiring of funds, family borrowing, and the need or banking services. The goal is to process this information to assess the opportunity Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

for banking ad financial service firms to enter these markets. The neighborhoods have different Hispanic compositions, such as one of recent immigrants and more established. The results of the project will be beneficial to the community and will likely provide evidence that additional services would be profitable in the community. There is no need to travel to the communities to successfully conduct the analysis, but students are welcome to perform a city visit. Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

2. “Retail Leakage Analysis”

As lower-economic neighborhoods are often overlooked by retailers, banks, pharmacies, and other major service providers, it is known that the phenomena of “Retail Leakage” occurs in such neighborhoods. In Retail Leakage, residents leave their immediate community to conduct business in surrounding neighborhoods. Quantifying the volume of such retail leakage out of the community is important and useful in developing a business case for investment in the community showing leakage. This project involves analyzing the leakage of sales from neighborhoods in any of the major Social Compact cities, including Miami, Washington, DC, Baltimore, San Francisco, Louisville, to name a few. Visit the web site www.socialcompact.org for a complete list of cities. It is not necessary to travel to the cities to successfully complete this project, but students are welcome to perform a city visit to support the work.

3. “Financial Behavioral and Bank Indicators

Analyze how a series of financial behavior indicators (i.e. underbanked/unbanked index, number of credit lines, discretionary spending income) can inform product develop of lenders (i.e. banks, credit unions, micro lenders.

4. “Food Access Analysis”

Do a comparison (across cities or within a city) looking at the information on food access (number of stores, square footage per people, average distance to closest store) and demographic characteristics.

5. “Compare different demographic data sets (claritas, popstats, DrillDown, InfoUSA, ACNielsen)”

Compare these industry-widely used datasets and determine the strengths and weakness of the different datasets available. Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

Transunion www.transunion.com

Candidate Projects Transunion, the major credit bureau, head-quarted in Chicago, offers two projects. These projects are sponsored by Wilbert Noronha, EVP of Analytics at Transunion.

1. “Cost reduction by selective MVR (Motor Vehicle Report) ordering”

An MVR shows the history of traffic violations for a particular consumer. MVR are ordered during the auto insurance quoting process by the insurer from the state. MVR prices vary by state but are typically the most expensive piece of data used for auto insurance quotes. Many insurers order MVRs on every new customer. Selective ordering has the advantage of cost savings and the disadvantage of revenue reduction for false negatives, i.e. a higher rate could have been charged for a consumer with violation had these violations been known to the insurer.

Questions: How good does a violations predictor model have to be to generate value for an insurer? What should the main drivers of such a model be? Credit? Policy variables? Demographics? Should we use actual violations to create a solution or “violation alternatives” (tickets, claims)? How could we build a good violations prediction product and who should we market it to? Some market research on other MVR triaging products may be useful

2. “Financial patterns of people who move”

20% of the population moves every year (which often implies a change in insurance policy). What are there personal finance patterns? How and when do they change their financial account information? How and when do they shop for insurance? Is there a difference between “job movers”, “foreclosure movers”, “house upgraders/downgraders”, etc.? Most importantly, how do we detect their move and when/how do we market insurance products to them? (All inter-state moves and moves to a different risk area require auto insurance changes.) Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

Chicago Botanic Garden www.chicago-botanic.org

Candidate Project

The Chicago Botanic Garden is an internationally-acclaimed botanic garden in the northern suburbs of Chicagoland, operating as a not-for-profit organization. It has over 50,000 members who frequent the garden for a variety of activities, classes, children’s programs, and other events. Visitors and guests often travel many hours to visit the garden.

Project “Understanding Members’ Use Drivers of the Garden”

This study will examine various aspects of the garden’s membership base, such as the demographics, geographic proximity, membership renewal rates, and other activity usage patterns of members. Seasonal and daily usage patterns will be examined. Survey analysis of drivers for membership visits will be considered. Specific marketing opportunities such as partnering with on-line services and coupon outlets, such as Groupon, will be examined as opportunities to grow attendance and awareness.

This project is sponsored by Sophia Siskel, President and CEO of the Chicago Botanic Garden, a Kellogg alumnae. Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana www.girlscoutsgcnwi.org

Candidate Project “Analyzing Member Data for Increasing Member Engagement”

The Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana is the largest Girl Scout council in the country, supporting 85,000 Girl Scouts and 24,000 adult volunteers/leaders in Illinois and Indiana. GSGCNWI strives to build girls of courage, confidence and character who make the world a better place. Our Girl Scouts participate in programming that includes leadership development, product sales, camping and community service. Project: In the spirit of continuous improvement and with the goal of providing the optimum Girl Scout experience, GSGCNWI intends to reevaluate the type and response to our programming offering. The Girl Scouts of our council are diverse in their socioeconomic statuses, ages, interests and needs. We are looking for a team to analyze program offerings (inclusive of, but not limited to: participation compared to capacity, program cancellations, program additions, timing of reservations, participant cancellation, distance participants travel, location popularity, type/initiative interest, fee factor, demographics – population and socio-economic - compared to participant involvement and membership grade level involvement). Source data includes online reservation system detail reports, refund reports and membership and economic data provided by Girl Scouts of the USA.

The findings will directly inform the future structuring of the programs offered by GSGCNWI. This project is sponsored by Connie Willegal, VP of Program Strategy. Kellogg DECS 915: Analytical Consulting Lab Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Russell Walker, Ph.D. Kellogg School of Management  Northwestern University Winter 2011

Start-up: Baby Utility Belt

The product is a Baby Utility Belt (BUB) and is intended to be worn around the lower waist of child caregivers when they are 'on the go' - the belt, made from neoprene material - holds a variety of basic baby items, including a back pocket for a diaper and a mini changing pad and various front pockets that are uniquely designed on both the interior and exterior of the belt to hold a bottle, phone, money/identification, wet wipes etc. The belt is sleekly designed (it's not a fanny pack) and offers an alternative to large, bulky diaper bags. While the belt is not intended to replace a standard diaper bag, it does provide busy, active parents with a comfortable, efficient way to carry baby essentials. There is nothing like this on the market.

The design received a patent for the product and the owner is now working with a local Chicago manufacturer to produce a sample/prototype with the short term of objective (by January 2011) of producing a short production run of about 500 belts to test the market over the course of the next six months.

Project

“Building a Better Baby Belt: Business Case and Pricing Strategy”

In the interim, the owner would like to develop the business plan and conduct market research to validate the information. This will include a need to develop pricing strategy for the product.