Management. Lift your career and your organisation.

Organisations have access to more data than ever before. The Internet of Things and the rapid move to Industry 5.0, means that organisations are processing large data sets in a way that is unprecedented. This means there is a rapidly growing need for organisations to employ staff with capability to analyse large data sets, with the assistance of software. This can occur in all functions within an organisation. 

This Business Analytics for Large Data Sets course will equip you to analyse large data sets in all areas of an organisation, with the assistance of readily available software that continues to evolve to meet these needs. The techniques learnt in this course can apply to organisations across commercial, government and not-for-profit sectors, regardless of size. 

Please note this course focuses on analytics techniques, rather than data cleaning techniques. The course content assumes a basic level of numeracy.

Aims

The aims of this course are to:

• build on your underlying numeracy skills, so as to be able to analyse large data sets 
• become familiar with some of the more popular software for analysing large data sets 
• work with data sets across a range of formats, including numerical, text and images, to extract meaning 
• apply descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics tools to large data sets 
• manipulate structured data to gain new insight 
• develop dashboards of descriptive data using infographics software 
• predict data points using forecasting techniques 
• cluster words, images and numerical data with the aim of telling new stories.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• work with large data sets with confidence 
• use a range of readily available analytics software to assist with your analysis of large data sets 
• extract meaning from large data sets and tell stories that convey new insights 
• utilise a range of analytics techniques with large data sets including construction of data tables, regression modeling and cluster analysis 
• apply your analytics skills to a broad range of functional areas within organisations.

Content

Course content will cover some of the more commonly used analytics functions with large data sets. These functions will be taught using software that is both frequently used or emerging for efficiently analysing large data sets. 

The software and the associated analytics functions include: 

Excel

• Pivot tables 
• Pivot charts 
• Filtering with Power Query Editor 
• Data transformation (including vlookup conversion function) 
• Excel Analysis ToolPak (including regression, correlation, smoothing functions)

Tableau Public (free to download)

• Analytical techniques including trend lines, forecasts and reference lines 
• Developing infographics dashboards

Orange (free to download)

• Cluster Analysis of image data

Exploratory.io Public (free to download)

• Built on the programming language, R, this software will enable you to do: 
• Prediction modelling 
• K-means clustering 
• Word clouds

Although the above techniques have been listed against specific software, we will look at their cross-functional application to your areas of interest. For this reason, the number of attendees per class is strictly limited. 

This course will include many practical exercises with large data sets that have been accessed from public data bases, such as Kaggle.com and Data.world.

Intended audience

This course will assist people interested in analytics from all backgrounds. This includes: 

• Sales & Marketing professionals 
• UX/ CX professionals 
• Supply chain/ Logistics/Operations professionals 
• Finance professionals 
• ICT professionals 
• Human Resource professionals 
• Business Analysts 
• Business Managers 
• Risk managers 
• General Managers

Prerequisites

This course is intended for those people who already have a conceptual understanding of business analytics and are seeking a set of practical tools for analysing large data sets. For people seeking a basic conceptual understanding of business analytics, the Business Analytics Course is recommended as a pre-requisite to this large data sets course.

Delivery modes

• Face-to-face, presenter taught workshop using your own device 
• Online workshop via the platform Zoom

Delivery style

Delivered as an interactive workshop. You will learn through a variety of methods including: 

• individual and group activities 
• group discussion 
• case studies.

Materials

Course materials are distributed electronically using Dropbox.

Before the course

A laptop with the following software is required: 

• Excel 
• Tableau Public (public.tableau.com) – the facilitator can help you download this software during class time 
• Orange software (orangedatamining.com) – the facilitator can help you download this software during class time 
• Exploratory.io – the facilitator can help you download this software during class time.