Data Analytics Q + A
Common questions relating to Data Analytics
General Questions relating to the RobobAI platform
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What insights does the RobobAI Payment Analytics platform provide?
The platform leverages innovative AI-powered payments analytics to visualise AP data.
Intuitive, interactive dashboards have multiple lens to quickly illustrate payment opportunities and risks, including:
- Segmentation of suppliers based on size and the collective value that each represent
- Payment time behavior to assess the risk of late payment to small business
- Suppliers paid early provides an opportunity to negotiate early payment discounts
- Suppliers that accept card provides the opportunity to transfer payments to card. This can improve payment terms for small businesses, provide discount negotiation opportunities and improve liquidity
- Net DPO impact against sliding %WAAC. Filters enable the ability to focus on specific payment terms (in days) to establish tangible ROI and potential savings
Download an instant snapshot of custom insights via the Actionable Intelligence Report (AIR), available in the platform. -
What downloadable reports are available?
- Report builder enables users to create custom reports quickly and easily.
- Report parameters include all columns from your database, with the option to apply grouping functions to create and an aggregated report.
- Multiple custom report formats can be saved for future convenience and speed.
- Report builder provides different departments and different users the ability to quickly gain insights to address their individual business needs.
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Can report generation and delivery be automated?
At the current time, automated reports are not available. As above, the report builder functionality allows users to create their own report and save it for future speed and convenience.
Please provide report samples
- As above, report builder functionality enables users to create custom reports and save them.
- Actionable Intelligence Report (AIR), available in the platform.
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What bespoke or custom reports and insights are available at additional cost?
Managed Services are available on demand. RobobAI analysts and data scientists will analyse your comprehensive AP data and identify target areas for you to unlock value. Services typically include:
- Comprehensive Custom Spend Data Analysis (beyond platform)
- Data Extraction & Wrangling
- Data Enrichment
- Data Harmonisation
- Custom Taxonomy Mapping
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Does the platform provide an opportunity for us to customise the user interface?
We can add the filters which are present in the data schema, we can also add new bespoke charts. These are custom modifications and incur additional time and cost.
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Does your platform provide an opportunity for us to create our own dashboards?
Custom dashboards cannot be created automatically. Custom dashboards can be requested via the project team will incur additional time and cost.
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Does your platform rely on any third parties to host or deliver the services?
The RobobAI platform only uses 3rd party data for Modern Slavery, Sanctions, Adverse Media, Indigenous Suppliers and Sustainability dashboards. In these situations, the end client does not interface directly with the 3rd party. We have automated APIs which connect RobobAI to the 3rd party and fetch alerts to then visualise them throughout the relevant RobobAI dashboards.
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What classification taxonomy do RobobAI use?
As a standard, RobobAI use UNSPSC, the United Nations product and service classification system. We can also use alternative and custom classification systems, at additional effort. Please contact us to discuss further.
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What is Classification on the Fly?
Classification on the Fly (COTF) enables you to customise classification naming and see the effect of the change take place immediately across your dashboards.
Questions relating to the RobobAI Supplier Summary
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What insights does the supplier summary dashboard provide?
The supplier summary is an analysis of suppliers and their spend patterns. The primary objective of this dashboard is to provide card opportunity in the data, which can be easily adopted to modify the buying channel to achieve the potential savings which is calculated by the platform.
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What downloadable reports are available from the platform?
Classification on the Fly (COTF) enables you to customise classification naming and see the effect of the change take place immediately across your dashboards.
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What is the definition of the hero bar labels?
- Total spend value summation present in the supplier data.
- Count of Suppliers Distinct count of supplier in the supplier data.
- Suppliers being paid by card Suppliers where current payment type is Cards.
- Spend with Commercial Card accepting Suppliers Spend where “Supplier Payment Enablement Type” = “INCONTROL” and “COMMERCIAL”
- Suppliers Accepting Commercial Cards Distinct count of suppliers where “Supplier Payment Enablement Type” = “INCONTROL” and “COMMERCIAL”
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What is opportunity sizing and how is it calculated?
Opportunity sizing is the potential total benefit if we convert the spend from non-card to cards. This is calculated with below formula.
Opportunity Sizing = Rebate amount + Operation cost avoidance amount + Net WACC Impact.
Net WACC Impact = WACC of Cards + WACC of Actuals. -
How can I change the Opportunity variables?
With the help of sliders, users can modify the variables Rebate %, Operational efforts in days and WACC %. These sliders will automatically change the total opportunity size real time.
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What is current payment method?
Current payment method is the buying channel or payment method used by the customer in existing data.
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What is the meaning of invoice spend band?
Invoices spend band are various thresholds of number of ticket sizes of invoices present in respective buckets. Ticket size, here, is calculated as Spend divided by number of invoices.
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What is the meaning of supplier spend band?
Suppliers spend band is the threshold of spend aggregated at a supplier level.
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What is the meaning of supplier card acceptance?
It is indicating if the given supplier has accepted in the any commercial cards in the past with “Yes” or “No”.
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What is invoice frequency?
This is number of times a supplier is invoiced in a year or a data frame, in case of Data Schema 1 this is calculated based on average ticket size.
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What is Payment Term and why is this useful?
Payment term is a contracted or agreed number of days as credit to customer to pay the invoiced amount to the suppliers. This is a very important variable, as this will have an impact on the WACC of both the customer and supplier.
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What is commercial card acceptance recency?
Card acceptance recency shows the latest time frame of the suppliers using a commercial card.
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What is a woman owned business and how is this identified?
A woman-owned business is a specific designation used by American government agencies and industry associations to set aside special programs to encourage and empower female business owners. Most definitions of this term involve a practical look at the legal and ownership structure, as well as the issue of control of the day-to-day operations of a business.
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What is a minority owned business and how is this identified?
Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) is an American designation for businesses which are at least 51% owned, operated and controlled on a daily basis by one or more (in combination) American citizens of the following ethnic minority and/or gender (e.g., woman-owned) and/or military veteran classifications.
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What is a small business and how is this identified?
Small businesses are types of corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships which have a small number of employees and/or less annual revenue than a regular-sized business or corporation. Businesses are defined as "small" in terms of being able to apply for government support and qualify for preferential tax policy.
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What is a non-profit business and how is this identified?
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organised and operated for a collective, public, or social benefit, in contrary with an entity that operates as a business aiming to generate a profit for its owners. A nonprofit is subject to the non-distribution constraint: any revenues that exceed expenses must be committed to the organisation's purpose, not taken by private parties.
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How can I apply filters on this dashboard?
All the horizontal bar charts and pie charts works as a clickable filter. Users can click on the filter icon (+ Add Filter) on top left-hand side to select the different dimensions to apply the filter across the relevant dashboards.
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How do I get access to these dashboards?
Any user from a customer organisation that needs access, please reach out to the RobobAI support team for assistance at support@robobai.com.
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Can I refresh this data periodically?
Yes, this can be done with an automatic process if the data file adheres to RobobAI’s designated format. For details, please reach out to RobobAI support at support@robobai.com.
General Data Analaytics Q&A
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What is data analytics?
Data analytics is the process of examining, cleaning, transforming, and interpreting data to discover meaningful insights, patterns, and trends that can inform decision making.
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What are the main types of data analytics?
There are three main types of data analytics: descriptive analytics (what happened), diagnostic analytics (why it happened), and predictive analytics (what might happen).
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What is the difference between data mining and data analytics?
Data mining is a subset of data analytics that focuses on discovering patterns and relationships in data, often using machine learning and statistical techniques.
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What is ETL in data analytics?
ETL stands for Extract, Transform, Load. It's a process in data analytics where data is extracted from various sources, transformed into a suitable format, and loaded into a data warehouse for analysis.
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What is the importance of data cleaning in analytics?
Data cleaning is essential to remove errors, inconsistencies, and outliers from data, ensuring that analysis is based on accurate and reliable information.
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What is a data warehouse?
A data warehouse is a centralised repository that stores data from different sources and makes it accessible for analysis and reporting.
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Explain the concept of data visualization.
Data visualization is the use of charts, graphs, and other visual tools to represent data in a way that makes it easier to understand and analyze.
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What is a dashboard in data analytics?
A dashboard is a visual representation of key data metrics and KPIs, typically displayed in real-time, to provide an overview of an organization's performance.
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What is machine learning in data analytics?
Machine learning is a subset of data analytics that involves the use of algorithms to enable systems to learn and make predictions or decisions without explicit programming.
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What is natural language processing (NLP) in data analytics?
NLP is a field of data analytics that focuses on the interaction between computers and human language, enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language.
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What is data privacy in data analytics?
Data privacy refers to the protection of individuals' personal information and ensuring that data is handled in compliance with privacy regulations and ethical standards.
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What is data sampling in analytics?
Data sampling is the process of selecting a subset of data from a larger dataset to draw inferences and make analysis more manageable.
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What is data normalization?
Data normalization is the process of scaling and standardising data to ensure that it falls within a consistent range, making it easier to compare and analyze.
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What is data wrangling?
Data wrangling is the process of cleaning, transforming, and organising raw data into a structured and usable format for analysis and decision-making.
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How does data wrangling differ from data normalization?
Data wrangling involves cleaning, transforming, and organising raw data to prepare it for analysis, while data normalisation is a specific technique used to rescale and standardise the values within a dataset to a common scale, ensuring fair comparisons between different features or variables.
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What is data mining in data analytics?
Data mining is the process of discovering hidden patterns and relationships in data to extract valuable information.
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What is data governance?
Data governance refers to the management and control of data assets within an organisation, including data quality, security, and compliance. For more details about RobobAI’s information security click here.