Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) alumnus, Zhang Kaixiang led a project stream team to emerge ASEAN Regional Winner, after a 6 month nomination judging process. His project team was also one of the global finalist out of 270,000 employees for Pursuing Innovation during the Ernst and Young’s (EY) Better begins with you (BBWY). BBWY is a global award programme that celebrates the people of EY who have found inspiring ways to build a better working world and exceptional successful engagement. Together with 120 EY Global Managing partners, the team attended the grand award ceremony in Berlin, Germany, where they were received by EY CEO Mark Weinberger.
In their project “How predicting when ships arrive boosts efficiency for an entire port”, they devised three solutions to reduce miscalculations in a vessel’s arrival time so as to overcome the overwhelming logistics at large ports where over 100 vessels with more than 20,000 20-foot containers transit.
One of the three solutions stood out as it included approximately 20 artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning models to predict the arrival of vessels 14 days in advance to ensure that resources could be planned beforehand to meet demand.
The 3 solutions significantly increased the port’s efficiency, creating substantial cost savings within a mere 4 months of the initial proposal. Kaixiang and team raised accuracy by 3% beyond the client’s benchmarks for vessel prediction and helped the client save approximately US$10.2 million. Most importantly, the client used advanced data analytics technologies to drive disruptive operational changes in building their intelligent ports.
The port operator developed trust in the team as they understood its problem, engage fully with the organisation, and transform the operation. The team clinched an additional major project and it was subsequently one of the top three in the port operator’s global innovation challenge category of an internal competition.
Abhishek, another alumnus of the Master of Science in Business Analytics Programme, was also part of a project team that was selected as regional winner for driving exceptional client service category at BBWY. Besides understanding clients’ needs and develop supply chain dashboards, he also worked on conducting ideation workshops with the client.
Congratulations to both Kai Xiang and Abhishek for putting what you’ve learnt to good use and bringing analytics to improve processes and drive performance. We look forward to more of such innovative solutions from all our alumni!
Click on the links below to learn more about them:
- Connecting analytics to business – Abhishek’s testimonial as a MSBA student graduate
- Saving dollars and cents with business analytics – Zhang Kaixiang’s testimonial as a MSBA graduate
For more information about the Master of Science in Business Analytics programme, visit https://msba.nus.edu.sg/.