IDEA DEEP INSIDE IKEA: PATRICK SHARRY

Patrick Sharry - How to become more strategically agile In a data driven world

• Patrick Sharry, an AGSM Fellow, acts as a ‘virtual coach’, asking the learner a series of questions about the decision they are making. They are then guided to the most suitable decision-making tool.

AGSM Executive Leadership Case Study

Patrick Sharry | UNSW Business School

About Patrick Patrick is an expert facilitator with extensive experience working with senior executives across a diverse range of industries including financial services

 

Made for STRATEGIZING - UNSW Business School (Social Media and Data)

 

1. “Without big data, you are blind and deaf and in the middle of a freeway.” – Geoffrey Moore

2. “In God we trust, all others bring data.” — W Edwards Deming

3. “Data is the new oil.” — Clive Humby

4. “No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data.” – John Sculley

5. “Torture the data, and it will confess to anything.” – Ronald Coase

6. “With data collection, ‘the sooner the better’ is always the best answer.” – Marissa Mayer

7. “Big data isn’t about bits, it’s about talent.” – Douglas Merrill

8. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” — Sherlock Holmes

9. “Without a systematic way to start and keep data clean, bad data will happen.” — Donato Diorio

10. “You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.” — Daniel Keys Moran

11.“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” — Jim Barksdale

12. “Above all else, show the data.” – Edward R. Tufte

13. “Big data is at the foundation of all of the megatrends that are happening today, from social to mobile to the cloud to gaming.” – Chris Lynch

14. “Data are just summaries of thousands of stories – tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful.” — Chip & Dan Heath

15. “Data beats emotions.” – Sean Rad

16. “Contact data ages like fish not wine…it gets worse as it gets older, not better.” — Gregg Thaler

17. “Data really powers everything that we do.” – Jeff Weiner

18. “Data that is loved tends to survive.” – Kurt Bollacker

19. “Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.” – Charles Babbage

20. “Where there is data smoke, there is business fire.” — Thomas Redman

PwC data tool halves M&A due diligence time

Yolanda RedrupReporter

Feb 8, 2021 – 3.00pm

PwC’s Australian team has built a data analysis tool that it says cuts down the time it takes to conduct due diligence on a merger and acquisition transaction by as much as 50 per cent.

Its Decision Analytics Platform, built on on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, has been used in 150 transactions and is in the process of being rolled out globally.

Designed to help M&A teams properly assess the value of a business, the platform analyses not only a company’s own data, but relevant third party information, in order to determine what price a client should pay for a company, or which companies could make good acquisition targets.

PwC Australia deals leader Rob Silverwood with PwC director Charlie Pickett and Microsoft chief partner officer Rachel Bondi.  Supplied

Speaking to The Australian Financial Review, PwC Australia deals leader Rob Silverwood said while the platform is capable of reducing a traditional DD process by more than 40 per cent, his team pitches to clients that rather than reducing their fees, they’re able to offer a better service by spending that same amount of time adding new value.

“It certainly reduces a lot of man hours,” he said.

“What we’re finding is the process is probably taking a lot, or basically about the same amount of time, but the quality of the insights and the depth of what’s coming out is a lot more valuable.

“Rather than having a traditional scope due diligence report, you’re actually delving a lot more into the real business drivers of the target business or business that you’re selling.”

In 2021, PwC expects to complete more than 400 deals using the platform.

Last year the tool helped guide Quadrant’s $100 million investment in pre-packed meals business My Muscle Chef.

PwC director Charlie Pickett, who worked on the My Muscle Chef deal and also helped created the Decision Analytics Platform, said the platform allowed them to not only look at My Muscle Chef’s direct-to-consumer and online sales, but examine the geographies it serves, the population sizes and median incomes to determine the potential of the business.

“What we did was probably a long way ahead of what we would have done in the old world ... Bringing together the siloed data for the third party piece was probably the real value-add for us,” he said.

“We just wouldn’t be able to get through [these data sets] without a technology-enabled approach because you’ve got 30 million rows of sales data, trying to crunch through that with Excel, is impossible, let alone all the time it would take.

“Using the technology means you slip down the amount of time you’re spending on the transformation work and you can spend your time on the insight and decision making.”

In the My Muscle Chef transaction, PwC also examined how many times customers bought a meal and the gap between each purchase.

Mr Pickett said he believed the tool would also be able to be used prior to entering due diligence on an acquisition, when a company was assessing possible targets, and also after the fact to help new owners make better decisions when integrating companies.

The tool is being used in four other markets and there’s another six countries gearing up to start using it.

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Microsoft has been supporting the rollout of the tool in PwC’s other offices.

Microsoft chief partner officer Rachel Bondi said the tech giant was also keeping Mr Pickett’s team in the loop of upcoming changes to Azure, so they could continue developing new features for the due diligence tool.

The professional services firm started developing the platform almost three years ago, knowing there was value in using deeper data sets.

Now that the tool is being used on 90 per cent of transactions locally, Mr Pickett said the focus was on developing the analytics component of the tool.

“Now we’ve got to the point where we’ve got scale, we’ve automated, systematised our approach to data, and we’ve got it developed and rolled out into all these different territories. [So], this is the point in which we can actually get more sophisticated around the analytics,” he said.

Within PwC, one of the biggest changes the platform has brought about is a reduction in the data crunching grunt work for junior employees.

Mr Silverwood said graduate employees were still needed, despite the automation, but that their early training now looks very different.

“It’s allowing them to get out of the data banks and think about what the data means.... Now it’s very much, ‘Here’s the data set, what are the key trends and observations that you want to bring to life out of this?’,” he said.l

Yolanda Redrup writes on technology from our Melbourne newsroom. Connect with Yolanda on Twitter. Email Yolanda at yolanda.redrup@afr.com.au

NSW joins Canberra on the Internet - AFR

 The NSW Public Accounts Committee's Mr Jozef Imrich said the Web technology gives users the opportunity to bring government