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Showing posts from 2013

TAX.......Avoid it

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Tax Calculator built in Tableau for the year 2013-2014. Learn About Tableau Earlier today I has posted on my fb wall that paying tax is like buying blood diamonds, you eventually put money in wrong hands and I still stand by my statement.

Why are Doctors wealthier than Barbers

Question                                                                                 Average answer from 23 Respondents How often do you see your Physician (No of times a year)         5 How often do you see your Barber (No of times a year)         14 What is the average fee per visit with your physician                 260 What is the average fee per visit with your Barber                 100 Who do you think is richer ? Physician / Barber                         Physician Well, lets do that math. An average guy pays 14*100 = 1400 to an Barber and 5*260 = 1300 to a physician  annually. How come the physician got richer? Everyone in India would agree with the statement that Doctors are wealthier than Barbers. (There are a couple of respondents who think otherwise) But why is it so? Is my question. If you look at your Google local listing, you will probably notice that there are as many listing for doctors as there are for barbers. In any average locality y

LokSabha - Worst than college Kids?

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Everyone bunks classes when in college. But most colleges would demand a minimum of 75% attendance. In the Indian LokaSabha, since 2009 overall attendance of our leaders is 74.4%. Scroll down further to see how many sessions people have attended since the last elections. This is the demographics of our current LS Learn About Tableau MPs from my state (Karnataka) only have 66% attendance. Bachelors and bachelorette MPs bunk the most More children MPs have higher the attendance!  Older members have better attendance. Learn About Tableau Artists, Computer scientists and Engineers miss parliamentary sessions more than others. Play around with the data and see how your Constituency/ State MPs have fared

Property as an Investment.

There is a seven floored Shobha on the way to my wife's office. The apartments are ready to occupy and there are very few occupants. It has been this way from at least a year.   I have been seeing at least 5 to-let boards on completed/old commercial complexes from the last six months in the vicinity of my house. Close to 50% of the new stores, shops that had come up in the last 6 months have closed. Sweet vendors, cloth stores, stationary shop etc. One of them told me that the business was not good and he could not afford the rent. The Business in general has not been good. But how then, have the real-estate prices been holding up? Black money. Most of real-estate business runs on black money, the kind of money that did not expect returns anyway. It (black money) was parked under beds and pillow covers it is now standing as a building. And the real-estate Mafia, it appears to me, is holding the real-estate prices, artificially. The impression that most of us get when go our

Challenging CAGR as growth comparison metric

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As a business analyst you may be required to compare growths of different entities over several periods. Conventionally, one would think of percentage growth or CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) to compare growth rates. These are also the metrics your management is mostly familiar with. However, in many cases these metrics may not do a good job. Let us say you are in B2B industry and your boss asks you to identify the fastest growing customer in the last 6 months (or 6 years). At the outset, this question seems simple and straightforward. As you start working on this, you will  realize that this is not straight forward. This is very different from comparing your portfolio returns using CAGR or finding the fastest growing country. You cannot simply measure the percentage growth between the first month and the sixth month and use that for comparisons. The reason being, each of your partner could be from a different industry and could have different purchasing cycles. This will

Employees are assets but workforce is a liability.

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“Employees are our assets” almost every CEO has perhaps used it at least once in his lifetime. However, adding these assets under these uncertain economic conditions has become somewhat difficult. Companies, big and small alike, often do not have a steady influx of projects. You may have projects to engage 600 people in one part of the year in other parts of the year you may not have enough work for 200 people. In such cases it is impossible to maintain a workforce of 600 throughout the year. This problem has given rise to new breed of manpower sourcing agencies. We often refer to them as body shoppers. These firms provide temporary workforce to those companies in need. Some larger companies also utilize their bench by lending their workforce to other companies on a temporary basis.  From the example above, the company would employ 200 people and hire contractors when their workforce need gets escalated. Body shoppers employ contractors and supply them on a need basis. Reaso

The Almighty Report

Employees from across industries and domains frown when their managers ask them for a report. Reporting, in the eyes of many, is not a productive activity. Nonetheless, every organization maintains a fleet of reporting / MIS analyst, Business analysts, BI tools etc.  For most companies the reporting and analytics fleet will remain an overhead unless the core business of the company is analytics, BI or reporting. Despite its auxiliary nature, reports are very powerful. They help those at the helm to call the shots which can make or break the future of a company, and those associated with it. People providing reports are always the first to see information, like a sailor atop the mast. The reporting team will have the results of a company even before the CFO sees it. In many companies, members of the reporting team are prohibited from trading in shares. And the power of these reports puts its creators in a very responsible spot. Like my Manager rightly reminded me, a wrong report an