(US and Canada) Ethiraj Purushothaman, Head – Advance Analytics & Data Science (interim), Best Buy, speaks with Leonard Maganza, Chief Customer Officer, Syniti, about his career, the value of analytics, and the approach to outcomes.

Purushothaman has 25 years of combined consulting and industry experience and has worked across various industries. He says that retailer Best Buy’s vast amount of data and proximity to its customers influenced his decision to join the company.

He says that Best Buy data analytics practitioners’ primary focus is to deliver outcomes to the business. Those outcomes include enabling better decisions, driving better customer experiences, improving employee experiences and increasing data-driven operational efficiencies. Best Buy’s approach starts with the outcomes, maps them to the decisions, experiences and efficiencies, and then identifies the appropriate data analytics solutions. 

Purushothaman explains that the goal is to help stakeholders think through business problems using design-thinking frameworks, identify the questions, and then help answer them. Best Buy’s data analytics group always focuses on outcomes. 

Sharing his approach to measuring outcomes, Purushothaman says the key is to adopt the same metrics used to measure business partners.

Further, he talks about how a problem with the outcome is not always about algorithms but insufficient data. For example, one of Purushothaman’s former employers had a problem with declining content delivery performance. Sales teams were not following the management process correctly regarding the early delivery of some large orders. The late delivery of some of those orders was because of the early delivery. This disrupted the supply chain and clogged resources for large-order processing.

The company developed different outputs to improve the sales teams’ compliance and automated some fulfillment system processes. The company’s content delivery performance improved by more than 95% in two years.