On the first day of the Data Science AI Retreat (DSAIRe) underway at the Trademark Hotel in Nairobi, it has indeed been a pleasure to listen to, experience about 40 participants – CXOs and leadership teams – representing 14 organizations from ten critical sectors of the Kenyan economy immersed in the understanding, sharing, engaging in exhilarating discussions in and about data science and AI, and their applications.

• Banking
• Packaging
• Logistics and Supply chain
• ECommerce
• Food processing
• Healthcare
• Tech and Data
• Venture capital
• Consulting
• Automobile

The morning sessions facilitated by eminent data scientist, consultant and chief facilitator Professor Dr Raghunathan Rengaswamy of IIT Madras Zanzibar dwelled deeply into the conceptual understanding of Big Data, the four Vs framework, AI/ML techniques, Generative AI, Large language models enlightening the participants of the conceptual essentials of data science.

The post lunch sessions by Dr Sathish Swaminathan from IIT Madras Zanzibar dived deeply into a couple of use cases that he has been anchoring, impacting the humanity, like pollution, and how Data Science is being used to solve it in many cities of India and abroad as an example to set the platform to draw particular issues and challenges pertinent to each of the entities participating, after they identified the big data within their own entities.

A few of the challenges that were shared by entities in each of the sectors lead to continued discussions on how to collect, collate, clean, and analyze the data to find solutions using data science and AI. Here are a few that I have heard –

BANKING

• A better way of identifying the needs of a particular age group of clients to design new products and services to attract new clientele or upsell to the current clients.
• A critical problem we would like to have insights into is Customer retention and Churn rate based on the data attributes we have indicated.
• The problem statement is based on customer data and complaints center data we access, regarding products and services offered, to not only meet the needs of the clients but also bring customer delight.

HEALTCARE and HOSPITALS

• How to identify and address the issues of unethical practices – Hospitals and doctors prescribe expensive treatments and processes even when the patient does not need them and can be cured by simple treatments and drugs, because of insurance companies involved in the game of pushing their products and services.
• How to identify the timely needs in over 5000 hospital and clinics of Africa that we cater to, on production and delivery of various medical equipment we supply.

CONSULTING

• How do I empower my client to be judicious, by using data science, in managing the various stock levels of expensive equipment so that they are neither understocked nor overstocked, so that their money is not locked up in unproductive stocking, but they also not lose out on not able to deliver timely.

FMCG sales, distribution, and Logistics

We are working on a solving several issues to impact growth in General Trade in FMCG sales and sales teams, by looking at a number of identified problems, of which we have picked a subset of the current problems as below:

For our GT customers we want to be able to:-

1. Predict stock-outs at each store

2. Predict which store is likely to order, when and how much…

For our Sales teams

1. Analyze and predict the SKILL gap of each sales rep.

2. Augment the SKILL of each sales rep with store specific TASKS for each visit.

PACKAGING COMPANY

Every member of the leadership team raised issues they are pre-occupied with as they are leading role holders in the organization.

1. One of the critical challenges we face is dealing with complex pricing and costing structures, especially in our industry with many, many product lines and variable cost components. Also, ensuring accurate and fair pricing that reflects both the true cost of production and market dynamics while remaining competitive can be challenging.

• One of my biggest challenges is how to use data effectively to reach new customers in an industry where traditional advertising tools like out of home, television, radio, and print are not as popular. FYI currently using social media.

• One challenge we are facing in production planning is items going out of stock. We have two types of product categories: customer-specific items and general market items.
  • For customer-specific items, we run production as per job cards as and when we receive them.
  • For general market items, we follow a min and max level approach. Our system triggers automatically when inventory levels reach below the min level. The min level is determined based on historical data and specific days of sales quantity. Within these specific days, production is planned to replenish the stock. However, sometimes all customers place orders for specific items at the same time, leading to stock outs.
  • In such cases, what improvement we can make on production planning to ensure that no items go out of stock while maintaining a minimum inventory level.

The discussions are still underway, and Dr. Sathish has been endeavoring in finding various ways to enable and empower every team to be competent enough to not only identify such problems and challenges but also how to use various basic data science frameworks, algorithms, and tools to solve them through hands-on experiments using various relevant data sets….

Tomorrow is yet another exciting day, that every participant is eagerly looking forward to…

Apart from diving deeper into AI/ML algorithms by Prof Raghu, and discussions and facilitations by Dr. Sathish on solving the problems identified by the participants, we will have ZINDI Africa leading the cases studies sessions with TAM OGUBAI bringing in case presenters David Lemayian, AI facilitator from Qhala, Darius Moruri and Chris Orwa freelancing data scientists practicing and solving problems in Kenya.

I too am eager to listen to and also see how these companies go about finding ways to solve their challenges and issues…

@techpakindustriesltd @BOIkenya @marsyetu @africare @njoro_canning @primebankafrica @copia @whiteklay @LAAconsulting