The Data Scientist is a key role within the core BCA Marketplace Intelligence team. The Data Scientist is responsible for creating business value from statistical analysis. Examples of business benefits from this statistical analysis might include the development of new revenue streams, identifying the impact of decisions on business profitability or by understanding cost drivers. Examples of the analysis they would undertake:
• Building models of branch efficiency drivers
• Developing understanding of drivers of auction performance
• Forecasting business performance in upcoming periods
• Understanding BCA’s market share compared to competitors
• Reviewing the impact of new acquisitions on the BCA marketplace
• Helping to refine data quality in the BCA data warehouse
They work with BCA’s team of Data Champions in each business function to identify new opportunities for statistical analysis to add value. They build solutions using BCA’s best of breed Business Intelligence solutions (SQL Server, Business Objects, R and Qlikview). Once solutions are developed they are handed over to Data Champions or other business users to run on an ongoing basis.
Main Responsibilities
1. Development & maintenance of new analytical models to support BCA decision making e.g. volume forecasting, buyer recommendations, auction site selection, cost modelling, etc. Models are to be developed in the R system following industry best practice
2. Work with reporting team to help design simple to understand reporting dashboards to enable effective business usage of analytical outputs
3. Explain the implications of analytical models to business stakeholders in easy to understand way and help them understand changes required to business process
4. Proactive identification of new opportunities to leverage data for business advantage
5. Build good working relationship with Data Champions and other data experts in each business function
6. Support in the identification of data quality issues in the BCA data warehouse to help drive use of accurate information by all business functions across BCA
7. Support the drive towards data definition standardisation and higher organisational data quality & consistency
8. Become key evangelist for the BCA data analytics approach (business issue identification, hypothesis definition, data extraction, analytics, reporting and implementation)
9. Stay abreast of industry trends and best practices in the use of data and statistical methods. Responsibility for training other resources as required
Skills and expertise
• Extensive knowledge of automotive market and relevant industry metrics such as CAP, Glass, etc.
• Detailed understanding of all core BCA data systems
• Experience of using SQL to extract data from source systems
• Advanced knowledge and understanding of statistical approaches to understand data. E.g. Logistic regression, general linear models, decision trees, machine learning, cluster analysis, etc.
• Advanced use of statistical modelling tools for example R, SPSS, SAS to interpret data, identify correlations and make recommendations. Experience in using R to solve business issues particularly valuable
• Experience of using Business Objects and Qlikview to report information
• Advanced use of Excel and PowerPoint to report data to stakeholders