“We wanted to know what our data could tell us. What are our cost and revenue drivers? More importantly, we wanted to find out what we didn’t know, and see if we could identify some of the blind spots,” said Mr Nah.
SLE then engaged Singapore Polytechnic’s Data Science and Analytics Centre (DSAC) to make sense of its data collected over the past few years. The DSAC team took three months to learn about the business, digest, and analyse the data before delivering their findings to SLE’s management team.
Before embarking on the project, SLE spoke with DSAC Centre Director, Dr Edna Chan and senior lecturer, Mr Loh Kwong Khuin from the School of Computing to scope out the problem. “From there, they presented a problem statement and recruited students who were keen to take on this project,” Mr Nah explained.
SLE General Manager Lawrence Nah (second from left) and his employees looking at the data that DSAC presented.
Impact Achieved
The three-month engagement proved to be time well spent, as Mr Nah and his team discovered new insights based on the old data.
For example, the students collated all of SLE’s purchase orders over the years and derived profitability or loss estimates for each transaction. The results surprised the management team – certain work which they thought was unprofitable turned out to be profitable, and vice versa.
Upon completion of the project, DSAC also recommended ways to address the problem statement identified at the start. These included suggestions on potential revenue sources that SLE could explore and a review of its cost drivers.
“Through this project, we were able to better understand which revenue drivers had a higher impact on the business bottom line so that we could sharpen our focus and attention in those areas,” said Mr Nah.
The insights enabled him and SLE’s team of data engineers to delve further into specific areas of the business with operational gaps, inefficiencies, or productivity losses.
“We learnt about what we could do better as a company, even in the way we use the digital tools that are already available to us, to make the data analytics process easier in the future,” said Mr Nah.
“Through this project, we were able to better understand which revenue drivers had a higher impact on the business bottom line so that we could sharpen our focus and attention in those areas,” said Mr Nah.
Mr Lawrence Nah, General Manager, Shing Leck Engineering