The advances in technology in the recent past have led to an exponential growth in data creation and changed the way organizations do business. However, the massive data volumes have the power to cripple a business if they are not appropriately stored, managed and made readily accessible to the business. Organizations today need to transform the way they leverage these new age data assets into building sustainable business advantage. When Rohit Mathur and Ramendra Shukla were interacting with the clients in course of their career, they found that most of the clients' decisions were based on thumb rules which were quite irrelevant as per the new market scenario and dynamics. The need of the hour was to integrate disparate data sets, marry the external and internal organization data, structure it and then create insights for management decision making. This led to the formation of Exponentia Data Labs, a big data analytics consulting company offering end-to-end data analytics services in 2013. "The idea was to help the clients to change to informed decision making which would help the senior management and people at cross levels to take decisions in the business based on what is actually there on the ground rather than the preferences they have," explains Rohit. While the data actually existed with the clients, they had no way to analyze the same and derive intelligence out of it. This helped the duorealize the opportunity that there is a market for data analytics services. They understood the clients' requirements and decided to serve certain clients on the data discovery side initially and handhold them to move towards analytics journey. Today, Exponentia operates as decision enablers for the clients to provide them multiple services ranging from data warehousing to business intelligence to analytics.

Exponentia works with clients across banking, financial services, pharma and healthcare sectors. In banking, Exponentia is trying to bring predictability to business parameters that lead to better operation planning. For example, Exponentia is helping reduce cash across the entire supply chain by predicting transactions at the ATMs and branches. For micro finance companies and foreign exchange companies, Exponentia is helping to increase cross sell opportunities and repeat customer behavior. In the pharma sector, Exponentia helps pharma companies to optimize their field force operations for having sales force more aligned to the market, competition and field activities are designed to yield maximum sales. In the healthcare sector, Exponentia leverages the power to data, analytics and technology to provide state-of-the-art solutions for hospitals and healthcare service providers. "We work with diagnostic firms where we analyze clinical data to reveal the trends about people's disease profile, and their diagnostic requirements in order for the diagnostics companies to develop preventive healthcare plans." says Rohit. The team believes domain expertise to be a very crucial aspect of their business. "We have sector experts who help us formulate use cases of analytics across sectors and drive innovation." he adds. Ramendra further explains how he and his team render a helping hand to the clients' organization by institutionalizing the data driven decision making. The analytics models and business intelligence outputs are integrated to client's existing processes to make them more efficient. The team does complete ETL, data warehousing jobs to prepare the base for analytics following which the data scientists and business analysts use sophisticated data discovery and analytical methods to deliver insights for decision making.

Exploring the Potential

Lately, data based decision making has become a mandatory spend in the business resulting in increase of business efficiency and delivering a larger RoI than what people perceive it to be. Rohit, who was earlier associated with investment banking, recounts one of the biggest challengeswhile setting up the company was changing the clients' mindset asthey didn't feel the need of databased decision making. "It took a great deal to convince the clients about investing in data based decision making. Even today, people think this to be a discretionary spend in their business," states Rohit. To overcome this, the team adopts a consultative approach and demonstrates how analytics can help client's businesses. "We consciously adapted a strategy of doing a pilot for clients to show to them how it adds value to their organization. Once they get convinced, they definitely sign up for full-fledged deployment. Our conversion ratio from pilot to final sign off is almost 100 percent," he adds.

A Bright Future