All -- Our next Research IT Reading Group topic will be: Analytics on UC strategic sourcing data with IPython and BCE
*When:* Thursday, October 23rd from noon - 1pm *Where:* 200C Warren Hall, 2195 Hearst St (see building access instructions below). *Event format:* The reading group is a brown bag lunch (bring your own) with a short ~20min talk followed by ~40min group discussion. ============================== The presentation and discussion will be facilitated by Andrew Clark and Alexis Perez from UC Berkeley/UCSF Strategic Sourcing. Andrew Writes writes: “Supply Chain Management - Strategic Sourcing reduces the time and money our campus spends on goods and services, so that our campus clients can use their time and money on the core mission of UC. This group of 8 uses data analytics, aggressive negotiation techniques, and partnerships with campus stakeholders to drive cost down and quality up. In the past three years, SCM-Strategic Sourcing has documented savings exceeding $28M for UC Berkeley (and about that for UCSF). Four years ago, SCM-Strategic Sourcing was a fairly typical administrative unit in terms of data capability. They relied on IT as their data provider and used Excel as the sole analysis tool. In those dark ages, analysis was typically a 1-time ad-hoc effort without any hope of reproducibility, replication, or sharing between analysts. However, that all changed the day we were asked to analyze a data set larger than would comfortably fit in Excel. After a brief review of “R vs. Python” blogs and with the help of some early Coursera/Udacity classes, Andrew decided on Python as the team’s standard programming language and proceeded to upgrade the collective skillsets of the staff. Around the same time, SCM-Strategic Sourcing hired two new analysts and offered them only Python, Postgres and Bash for their analysis needs completely eschewing Excel. Fortunately, the ruse worked and the organization was transformed. Today, Sourcing uses IPython Notebook, Pandas, Sci-Kit Learn and PostgreSQL to analyze UC’s Systemwide spend data, UC’s eProcurement catalog environments at 7 of campuses, and UC’s departmental spend patterns. The focus of the work shifted from “getting answers” to building “reproducible and auditable analytic pipelines” allowing the team to continually improve our analytic capabilities, reuse code and previous work, collaborate with analysts at both UCSF and Berkeley, and reproduce our analytic products for our stakeholders. With a solid set of tools and the programming know how to be dangerous, SCM-Strategic Sourcing is working through the following challenges: They don’t have staff allocated for resource intensive ETL processes, their data is ever growing and “seemingly worthless” to other administrative groups, and we have an extreme impatience for high latency systems. ============================== Here's the background material for review prior to our meeting: ⇒ Greg Macway (former Supply Chain Management - Strategic Sourcing Analyst) won a Berkeley campus Institutional Data Management and Governance award for most creative visualization <http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/09/17/idmg-summer-school-symposium/> for his BearBuy spend graph, which he created using Gephi. ⇒ Andrew G. Clark, UCSF Increases Consumer Value Through Optimal Vendor-Show Scheduling <http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/inte.1110.0568>. Interfaces 41 <http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/journals/interfaces/interfaces41.html#ClarkCO11>(4): 327-337 (2011) describes how a pre-merger UCSF Strategic Sourcing formulated a bipartite matching problem and solved it using binary integer programming to assign suppliers to supplier shows. ⇒ Alexis Perez’s SciPy 2014 presentation, Behind the Scenes of the University and Supplier Relationship <https://conference.scipy.org/scipy2014/schedule/presentation/1703/>, describes how Pandas and Python transformed a once tedious, time-consuming manual process into one that now takes only a few seconds to analyze supplier’s proposed price files and ensure the University is not paying more than contracted. ============================== Warren Hall access: For those who do not have keycard access to the building, please take the elevator to the second floor (stairwell door requires keycard). Before noon, let the receptionist know you're joining the Reading Group in 200C and s/he will let you in and show you the way. After noon, look for a sign next to the (closed) receptionist window to the right as you exit the elevators. We'll post a note with a phone number that you can call or text, and someone will come out to open the locked doors. We look forward to see you next week! -Camille
