The Café Great Contest – Unleashing Analytics Talent

A big hello to all the analytics wizards out there! Jigsaw Academy is proud to announce the winners of the Café Great Contest, which ran for over a month from 6th March to 16th April 2017. We received tons of submissions for this one-of-a-kind contest and witnessed hundreds of analytics aspirants actually sweating it out to make it to the finals. All we have to say is that your involvement in the contest shows your dedication and ambition you have with respect to your career in analytics and you all did impress the jury with your responses.

For those of you who don’t know what the contest was all about, here’s a quick run through. The contest was around a real-world data set of a café collected from its point of sale for the last 12 months. Despite the café’s USPs and pros, it was still struggling to meet its sales targets. Now, this is where our students came into action. They had to work on the real-world data (that spanned over a lac of rows on Excel) and dig for insights on where the café lagged and where it had to improve.

The contestants were required to come up with a winning formula to improve the café’s profits, sales, loyalty programs and upselling techniques and bring down operation costs, all with the help of the12-month data.

The contest was open to all the students and alumni of Jigsaw, where they were required to interpret and communicate their insights as infographics, presentations, or write-ups. All the entries were carefully evaluated and the results were announced after taking into consideration factors such as their understanding of the problem, approach, insights, technique, visualization, presentation and overall effort.

After careful thoughts and evaluation, here are our winners –

First Place: Surabhi Devgun

Second Place: Snehjeet Mukherjee, Nivedita Parab, Gargi Singh and Sourabh Panda (Group entry)

Sourabh Panda shares his experience in his own words: “Thank you for publishing the result in time. And feeling great that our team has been able to grab 2nd position among all. I hope z will organize such type of contests often so that it will boost our confidence and provide experience in handling case studies and project scenarios. I hope to finish my course and get an opportunity to do more projects like this and able to gain some more experience from it.”

Third Place: Hitesh Agarwal

Jigsaw Special Nomination: Abhinav Mishra

Abhinav Mishra shares his feedback on the contest saying that “As far as my experience is concerned. It was a great a learning experience for me. It helped me to look at business problems at different lenses. Starting from data assessment till communicating the results it was thoroughly an enjoyable experience. I would like to thank jigsaw for providing me such a wonderful opportunity and platform. Hope to continue my journey with same zeal and enthusiasm for future contests.”

Winners get a personal recommendation letter from the contest’s mentor Mr. Snehamoy Mukherjee, a certificate of excellence from Jigsaw Academy and a chance to get their work published online (including the Jigsaw Blog).

However, what makes us happier is the spirit of the competition, where the contestants went beyond what was expected out of them and made maximum use of this chance. More than a race, this was an experience that would help them in their life and career. Keeping this in mind, we will be back with another interesting contest soon. Make sure you’re there.