Since the first coffee house was opened in 1555, there has been a global market for coffee shops and signi­fi­cant busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties. To ensure sustained growth, local coffee shops now extend their offe­ring to a chain across various cities and count­ries. A signi­fi­cant player in recent years is Starbucks.

Between 2001 and 2007, the number of stores grew from 4,000 to 16,000 stores while still main­tai­ning a healthy profit margin. This use case shows one key element that has helped them stay ahead of compe­ti­tion all over the world by lever­aging on open data.

A key source of inter­nal data was the Star­bucks mobile app. Howe­ver, this inter­nal data­set alone was not suffi­ci­ent to gain insights and make criti­cal decis­i­ons. Besi­des their focus (new custo­mers) did not have the mobile app. Through a third-party company, open data on loca­tion of train and bus tops, popu­la­tion density in speci­fic areas and city demo­gra­phics was analy­sed and corre­la­ted with their inter­nal data sets. With this infor­ma­tion, Star­bucks is now able to deter­mine loca­tion for new coffee shops that will be profi­ta­ble. They also use meteo­ro­lo­gi­cal data in plan­ning speci­fic products to promote at diffe­rent times of the year.

The scena­rio descri­bed above invol­ved signi­fi­cant resour­ces in plan­ning, data gathe­ring, sort­ing and clea­ning before apply­ing machine lear­ning algo­rithms for predic­tion. Not all local coffee shops have the resour­ces to employ dedi­ca­ted teams for this task. The Adva­neo market place provi­des a solution.

Easy to Use: Rather than spend months gathe­ring and sort­ing through nume­rous data sets, compa­nies now have the oppor­tu­nity to get rele­vant data in a few clicks. These have been carefully cate­go­ri­sed with veri­fied end points to cut out unneces­sary time spent in search that lead to dead ends.

Privacy and Secu­rity: All data­set provi­ded on the market place have been checked for permis­si­ons and licen­ses. With one click you can check the permis­sion requi­red and limi­ta­ti­ons when using the dataset.

Corre­la­tion: We under­stand the need to corre­late multi­ple data sets. Adva­neo has cate­go­ri­sed all the data set such that a simple keyword search or clicking data­set tags will show other data­sets you might not have conside­red but may be rele­vant in solving your current challenges.

The scena­rio descri­bed above is not limi­ted to coffee shops as all major grocery chains now employ simi­lar models having inhouse data science teams. Lever­aging on the open data provi­ded on the Adva­neo market­place will lead to signi­fi­cant reduc­tion in resour­ces needed to have an in-house data science depart­ment as well as lead to new busi­ness insights in a shorter time scale.