Apogee Consulting Group

The Croton-Harmon Options and Opportunities for a Senior Experience (CHOOSE) project is an end-of-the-year project where CHHS students research a topic while working as an intern. The project is designed to help seniors transition to post-high school education or employment. I chose to work at Apogee Consulting Group and research how data is collected and used to make predictions in industry.

Apogee Consulting Group is a consulting company, local to Croton on Hudson, NY, that specializes in revenue and category management through "strategic storytelling." The company is owned by Dan Isleib. According to Mr. Isleib, "strategic storytelling" means aligning an organization on a path forward based upon data and insights.

Mr. Isleib's work involves analyzing many graphs and charts, many of which he would create manually. This was a very time consuming process, often because the same graph would have to be created for multiple products.

Using Visual Basic for Applications, I created Excel Macros to automate the creation of each graph and chart. One macro I wrote took raw data from a syndicated data provider like Nielsen or IRI, formatted the data, calculated the necessary information, created charts and graphs for each product, and then moved the most important information to a new sheet.

In total, I wrote over 1,700 lines of VBA code. The majority of the code creates graphs and charts. There are a few utility macros, one of which is used to import the other macros.

Along with the internship, the CHOOSE project has a research component. I researched how data is collected and how that data is used to make predictions.

I found that you could categorize data into two types: Business data and Consumer data. Business data includes all information that a business could collect about itself, as well as syndicated data (formatted data for a category, i.e. drinks) from companies such as Nielsen or IRI. Consumer data consists of all personal information about a user or customer of a business's products. This includes identifying information, such as names and addresses, as well as behavior and interest information, such as mouse movements and the types of movies you like.

All this data is used by companies to predict what you would like to buy. Using that information they are able to create targeted ads and promotions.