Wharton Customer Analytics will host an intensive one-week data competition with Essity, a global hygiene and health company.

What can we say? 2020 strikes again. The bad news? We need to postpone the Essity Datathon until Spring 2021. The good news?! We’re upping the ante. The top three teams can now win $1,500, $1,000, and $500, respectively.*

We’re waiting for the University to make a decision about in-person vs. virtual classes for the Spring semester. Once the plans are confirmed, we will announce the new dates of the datathon.

If you registered and already know that Spring 2021 won’t work for your schedule, no worries! You can unregister here.

Thank you for your understanding and patience. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us at customeranalytics@wharton.upenn.edu with any questions or concerns.

*Prize amounts are per team.

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This hackathon is open to University of Pennsylvania students only

Hone your analytics skills, working with real-world data!  Register as a team with varying skill sets, combining quantitative and qualitative abilities. The datathon will launch via webinar on Thursday, October 15 and culminate with finalist presentations on October 23.

Essity is a global hygiene and health company, with its headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden. The company develops, manufactures, and sells products and solutions within hygiene and health. The intention of this project is to improve Essity's supply chain logistics and optimize its operations set-up.

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Datathon Challenge

​Essity's global Tork brand and IoT solution is utilized by customers to clean more effectively. It uses IoT sensors in dispensers, bins, and people counters to accomplish this. It is sold as a subscription service directly to end customers and has a number of features in addition to the cleaning functionality such as customer feedback, messaging, and APIs.

Essity would like to understand if there is untapped value in the data being collecting as part of the Tork brand and IoT solution for smart washrooms. The idea is to discover or explore, within defined areas, possibilities to use that data to expand or add value to the business.  

Consistent with a real-life business problem, there is no prescribed approach, with teams free to exercise judgment on areas they feel will release the most value from the available data.  

Students should pick one of the following datathon themes to focus on:

• Customer Insights
  • Determine the customer “health score”
  • Tell something about the customer and about the value of the product/solution to the customer
    • Is the product delivering value to customers?
    • How are customers using the product and are they maximizing it?
  • Key loggers combined with other kinds of data to build customer health score
• Product
  • Predict if/when a dispenser will run out of the product, e.g. paper towels
  • Is there proof of maintenance? Was the task completed?
  • What’s the average time period between when a dispenser runs out of the product, and the task is completed (dispenser refilled)? Can the lag time between alert and refill be eliminated?
• Operations
  • Improve supply chain logistics or monitoring of devices
    • Are there new/better thresholds for locations?
  • Develop more predictive cleaning
  • Combine different data points to build up a dashboard
• Claims (proof of value of product/solution)
  • Optimization of refill/maintenance
  • Waste/wastage reduction
    • How much do you save by not refilling dispensers?
    • Example marketing action: By using this product, Essity claims that you can reduce waste by 20%

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Data Overview

Students will be provided with 1 year (Jan. 2019 – Jan. 2020) of data for 15 of Essity's largest Tork customers, including airports, amusement parks, and large office buildings. Customer locations have more than 100 sensors and/or 1000 units. The data and full documentation will be provided via the Microsoft Teams Essity Workspace.  

* Sample code to load and join the data will also be provided!

View data details

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Timeline

• TBD: Teams must register here by 11:59 p.m. ET
• TBD: Datathon kick off webinar and teams given access to data
• TBD: Student teams work, office hours for questions
• TBD: Virtual office hours
• TBD:  Virtual office hours
• TBD:  Judges Review Submissions
  • 7 a.m. ET: Deadline for video presentation and code to be uploaded to Devpost 
• TBD:  Finalist Presentations 
  • 12-1:15 p.m. ET: Finalist Presentations 
  • 1:15-1:45 p.m. ET: Judges Deliberation
  • 1:45-2 p.m. ET: Winners Announced

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Registration & Communication Platforms

• Registration form: https://cvent.me/9ad5qk?RefId=WCA+DevPost 
• DevPost: https://essity-datathon.devpost.com/
• Data access & communication: Participating students will be added to the Microsoft Teams Essity Workspace

View full rules

$350 in prizes

• Quality of approach and methodology
  
• Analysis of results and potential business impact
  
• Ease of implementation
  
• Translation & presentation of results to the audience
  

• IoT
• Productivity
• Healthcare