Most successful companies are very good at monitoring the factors that influence their business and responding to changes with fast and effective decisions and actions. In normal times, this is sufficient to ensure the company runs efficiently, effectively, and delivers on financial expectations. These are not normal times.
The COVID–19 pandemic has introduced new factors that affect nearly every business. There is no precedent, no case studies and no best practices to guide the way. Instead, companies must look at the available data — both internal and external— and try to understand how that data can be used to determine how the business is currently being impacted, how it is likely to be affected in the future, what are most likely scenarios that will play out, what can be done to counter those scenarios and take advantage of hidden opportunities in this rapidly changing environment.
New relevant and reliable data sources will be added to this data set as they come available and it will be constantly updated and revised. The pandemic is a moving target and will remain so for the foreseeable future. A good model can help identify trends, alert us when things are changing, show us how fast they are changing, and do so at various levels of detail.
These models — and the visualizations and dashboards they power — can be particularly helpful in evaluating
- supply chain dynamics
- demand planning
- HR and location vulnerabilities
- financial impacts
By integrating the Starschema COVID–19 Data Set with other related data — both internal and external — executives and managers can better understand the impacts at a deeper level and make business-critical data-driven decisions based on answers to newly relevant questions:
- What geographic areas are affected, how badly, when will they begin to normalize, and how quickly?
- What areas are at risk?
- What areas are threatened by a possible recurrence?
- How are government policies affecting each area and what effect will potential future policy changes have on the business?
- Who in your organization is at risk and how does this risk affect the capabilities of the organization?
- Who can be reassigned to ensure the most important functions and projects aren’t impacted?
- How is working from home impacting projects — good and bad?
- Which projects are at risk now and which are likely to be in the future?
- How does working from home impact operational costs?
- What supply chains, distribution centers, and customer channels are at risk now, and which are likely to become at risk in the future?
Through the work of collating, curating, and unifying the data we developed a nuanced understanding of the data, its biases, and how to best work with it to gain meaningful insights. Our solution teams are led by a senior data scientist with long-standing expertise in clinical epidemiology and the analysis of viral outbreaks.
