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Tag Archives: finding

Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

November 17, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

As a best practice in maintaining your Common Data Service environments, it is important to review your audit configurations at the table and column levels to ensure you are only auditing records that are necessary. This will prevent excessive growth of your audit partitions. If you are wondering what I mean by table and columns, see this post.

The problem is easily identifying each and every column within every table. Here is how you do it.

Using the webAPI, create the following query:

https://orgname.crm.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.1/EntityDefinitions?$ select=LogicalName,IsAuditEnabled&$ filter=IsAuditEnabled/Value%20eq%20true&$ expand=Attributes($ select=LogicalName,IsAuditEnabled;$ filter=IsAuditEnabled/Value%20eq%20true)

If you run this in your browser, it will return a list of tables and columns that are enabled for auditing in JSON format. Now, you need an easy way to read and analyze the data.

Let’s see how we can do this with Excel.

First, open a new blank workbook in Excel and select the Data tab

Click Get Data | From Online Services | From Dynamics 365 (online)

0336.pastedimage1605292203930v1 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Copy and paste your webAPI query from above and click OK

2402.pastedimage1605292386700v2 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Click Transform Data

5226.pastedimage1605292426512v3 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Click the expand button next to Attributes

0028.pastedimage1605292495188v4 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Uncheck IsAuditEnabled and click OK

4743.pastedimage1605292531049v5 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Finally, click Close & Load

7002.pastedimage1605292551484v6 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

You can do the same thing in Power BI. Check out below:

Open a new Power BI report and select Get Data and click More

6087.pastedimage1605292797714v7 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Then, select Online Services and Dynamics 365 (online)

1881.pastedimage1605292831301v8 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Click Connect and paste your webAPI query into the window

1055.pastedimage1605292874686v9 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Click Transform Data

5482.pastedimage1605292901900v10 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Click the expansion next to Attributes

5123.pastedimage1605292940439v11 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Uncheck IsAuditEnabled

0550.pastedimage1605292957861v12 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Click Close & Apply

4452.pastedimage1605292974719v13 Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Common Data Service environment

Once it refreshes, you will have a full list of tables and columns for your review.

I hope this helps!

Thank you for reading!

Aaron Richards

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Finding a monotonic polynomial over an interval

January 2, 2020   BI News and Info
 Finding a monotonic polynomial over an interval

I want to find a polynomial of specified degree $ d$ defining the function $ f:[0,1]\to[0,1]$ satisfying $ f(0)=0,f(1)=1$ and $ f$ is monotonically increasing over the interval. This seems like an easy enough task especially since there’s the trivial solution $ f(x)=x^d$ , and although my code seems to work decently well for $ d=2,3$ , it takes around a minute on my machine to produce an answer for $ d=4$ and it couldn’t get anything in the time I set it running for $ d=5$ . I’m looking to test this for values of $ d$ up to $ 10^3$ and find multiple instances for $ f$ , so this is certainly not going to work. What am I doing wrong and how can I make this efficient?

Here is my code:

deg = 4;
f[x_] := Sum[Subscript[c, k] x^k, {k, 1, deg}];
FindInstance[{
   f[1] == 1,
   ForAll[x, 0 <= x <= 1, f'[x] >= 0]
   }, Table[Subscript[c, i], {i, 1, deg}], Reals]

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A super-fast machine learning model for finding user search intent

November 30, 2019   Big Data

In April 2019, Benjamin Burkholder (who is awesome, by the way) published a Medium article showing off a script he wrote that uses SERP result features to infer a user’s search intent. The script uses the SerpAPI.com API for its data and labels search queries in the following way:

  • Informational — The person is looking for more information on a topic. This is indicated by whether an answer box or PAA (people also ask) boxes are present.
  • Navigational — The person is searching for a specific website. This is indicated by whether a knowledge graph is present or if site links are present.
  • Transactional — The person is aiming to purchase something. This is indicated by whether shopping ads are present.
  • Commercial Investigation — The person is aiming to make a purchase soon but is still researching. This is indicated by whether paid ads are present, an answer box is present, PAAs are present, or if there are ads present at the bottom of the SERP.

This is one of the coolest ways to estimate search intent, because it uses Google’s understanding of search intent (as expressed by the SERP features shown for that search).

The one problem with Burkholder’s approach is its reliance on the Serp API. If you have a large set of search queries you want to find intent for, you need to pass each query phrase through the API, which then actually does the search and returns the SERP feature results, which Burkholder’s script can then classify. So on a large set of search queries, this is time consuming and prohibitively expensive.

SerpAPI charges ~$ 0.01 per keyword, so analyzing 5,000 keywords will cost you $ 50. Running these results through Burkholder’s labeler script also takes 3 to 5 hours to get through these 5,000 keywords.

So I got to thinking: What if I adapted Burkholder’s approach so that, rather than use it to classify intent directly, I could use it to train a machine learning model that I would then use to classify intent? In other words, I’d incur one-time costs to produce my Burkholder-labeled training set, and, assuming it was accurate enough, I could then use that training set for all further classification, cost free.

With an accurate training set, anyone could label huge numbers of keywords super quickly, without spending a dime.

Finding a model

Hamlet Batista has written a few stellar posts about how to leverage Natural Language models like BERT for labeling intent.

In his posts, he uses an existing intent labeling model that returns categories from Kaggle’s Question Answering Dataset. While these labels can be useful, they are not really “intent categories” in line with what we typically think of for intent taxonomy categories and instead have labels such as Description, Entity, Human, Numeric, and Location.

He achieved excellent results by training a BERT encoder, getting near 90% accuracy in predicting labels for new/unlabeled search keywords.

The big question for me was, could I leverage the same tech (Uber’s Ludwig BERT encoder) to create an accurate model using the search intent labels I’d get from Burkholder’s code?

It turns out the answer is yes!

How to do it

Here’s how the process works:

1. Gather your list of keywords. If you’re planning on training your own model, I recommend doing so within a specific category/niche. Training on clothing-related keywords and then using that model to label finance related keywords will likely be significantly less accurate than training on clothing related keywords and then using that model to label other unlabeled clothing related keywords. That said, I did try using a model labeled on one category/niche to label another, and the results still seemed quite good to me.

2. Run Burkholder’s script over your list of keywords from Step 1. This will require signing up for SerpAPI.com and buying credits. I recommend getting labels for at least 10,000 search queries with this script to use for training. The more training data, the more accurate your model will likely be.

3. Use the labeled data from the previous step as your training data for the BERT model. Batista’s code to do this is very straightforward, and this article will guide you through the process. I was able to get about ~72% accuracy using about 10,000 labels of training data.

4. Use your model from Step 3 to label unlabeled search data, and then take a look at your results!

The results

I ran through this process using a huge list (13,000 keywords) of clothing/fashion-related search terms from SEMrush as my training data. My resulting model gets just about 80% accuracy.

It seems likely that training the model with more data will continue to improve its accuracy up to a point. If any of you attempt it and improve on 80% accuracy, I would love to hear about it. I think with 20,000+ labeled searches, we could see up to maybe 85-90% accuracy.

This means when you ask this model to predict the intent of unlabeled search queries, 8 times out of 10 it will give you the same label as what would have been returned by Burkholder’s Serp API rules-based classifier. It can also do this for free, in large volumes and incredibly fast.

So something that would have taken a few thousand dollars and days of scraping can now be done for free in just minutes.

In my case I used keywords from a related domain (makeup) instead of clothing keywords, and overall I think it did a pretty good job. Labeling 5,000 search queries took under two minutes with the BERT model. Here’s what my results looked like:

The implications

For SEO tools to be useful, they need to be scalable. Keyword research, content strategy, PPC strategy, and SEO strategy usually rely on being able to do analysis across entire niches/themes/topics/websites.

In many industries, the keyword longtails can extend into the millions. So a faster, more affordable approach to Burkholder’s solution can make a lot of difference.

I forsee AI and machine learning tools being used more and more in our industry, enabling SEOs, paid search specialists, and content marketers to gain superpowers that haven’t been possible before these new AI breakthroughs.

Happy analyzing!

Kristin Tynski is a founder and the SVP of Creative at Fractl, a boutique growth agency based in Delray Beach, FL.

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Compare two plots by finding the minimum distance among points

September 23, 2019   BI News and Info

I have a question about comparing the points within two plots.
I would like to compare two plots and find the minimum distance among their points, in order to find the nearest/common points (i.e. those ones with minimum -or zero-distance) and plot it (overlapping).
What I did is to extract the coordinates of their respectively points. But I do not know how to compare them and/or the two plots. I used the following line of code, but the result is completely different from what I am looking for.

Outer[EuclideanDistance, seq1, seq2, 1] // Flatten

e3Bc4 Compare two plots by finding the minimum distance among points

u9OaQ Compare two plots by finding the minimum distance among points
The result should show the points on the plot equal (almost in common) between the two plots.

Could you please help me?
Many thanks,
Val

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Restaurant Interviewing: Strategies for Finding the Right People

August 10, 2019   NetSuite
gettyimages 686086924 Restaurant Interviewing: Strategies for Finding the Right People

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

To say that eating out has become an important part of American culture is putting it lightly. According to the National Restaurant Association (NRA), Americans spend just over half (51%) of their food dollars in restaurants.

That’s more than double the share spent on eating out in 1955, and it’s not a trend that’s slowing down. The NRA further predicts that restaurants will employ 16.9 million Americans by 2029, up from 15.3 million today.

In other words, restaurants are hiring more people than ever. Add in the industry’s eye-popping annual employee turnover rate, which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics pegged at 73% in 2016, and that equals a lot of interviews.

It also means that hiring the right people — those who can handle stress, represent your restaurant, and, perhaps most importantly, stick around a while — can reduce what is becoming a huge interviewing burden.

In fact, having a toolbox of interviewing best practices can help restaurant managers better manage their time, wade through candidates more efficiently, and, ultimately, run a more successful business. Drive this point home with your hiring team: we’re in a people business, and just happen to serve food.

Efficient Interviewing Strategies

Many restaurant positions are entry-level roles, which creates many challenges with finding the right people. Developing a clear interview strategy is imperative to quickly filter candidates and build your “A-team.”

What’s more, finding convenient times to interview candidates can be a challenge in a stressful, fast-moving restaurant environment. For these reasons, alternate interview approaches can prove effective for working through the growing number of candidates.

Some restaurants might consider using open interviews, in which a restaurant simply announces it will be interviewing during a given window of time, and anyone who wants to apply can just show up. Open interviews enable restaurant managers to interview a lot of candidates in a short time, without the need to coordinate appointments for days on end.

Another option is a group interview, in which a restaurant calls in several candidates and interviews them simultaneously, sometimes even having them perform some kind of collaborative task. This is a great way to see how people work under pressure and in team situations.

With both approaches, it’s best to conduct interviews either when the restaurant is closed or during gaps between rushes.

Most often, however, restaurants interview candidates individually, in which case the setting becomes a more important consideration. No restaurant wants to take up a table during peak hours for interviews, so if it’s necessary to conduct interviews while things are hopping, it’s helpful to identify a quiet place—such as a banquet room, an office or some other private space—where interviews can be conducted in confidence.

Ask Important Questions

Most interviews eventually come down to questions and answers. And whether a restaurant is hiring servers, kitchen staff or even managers, having good interview templates with pre-established questions by role can prove effective in not only simplifying the interviewer’s job, but also in ensuring they’re asking appropriate questions from a legal standpoint (check state and local laws) and avoiding discrimination.

Questions restaurant managers should ask prospective employees:

-Why do you want to work in the food service industry? (If a candidate doesn’t know how to answer this, it’s a red flag.)

-What do you know about our restaurant, and what makes you a good fit? (This is a great way to see if a candidate has taken the time to prepare.)

-What does the word “hospitality” mean to you? (A simple question that’s at the heart of good food service.)

-Can you provide an example of how you handle unhappy guests? (No restaurant gets it all right. How employees handle problematic scenarios could determine whether diners become — or remain — regulars.)

-How would you handle conflict with co-workers? (Restaurants are charged environments where paths cross constantly. There’s a significant possibility of conflict on any given day.)

-What were the best/worst restaurant experiences you’ve had, and why? (Candidates will reveal numerous strengths and weaknesses in answering this.)

-What are (or will be) your favorite/least favorite parts about working in restaurants? (This can tell a restaurant much about whether a specific candidate will fit into its culture.)

-How do you deal with high-pressure situations? (Candidates who can’t deal with pressure probably aren’t the best fit for restaurant work.)

-What does it mean to you to be part of a team? (Running a successful restaurant is a team sport.)

-How do you handle occasions when life makes it difficult to show up to work on time? (Hint: Candidates who don’t have an answer for this are much more likely to have punctuality issues.)

Homing in on the Gems

Once an interviewer’s gut feeling says that a candidate has potential, additional questions can help to validate whether the person is a good hire.

For instance, the interviewer might want to ask potential servers how they would handle a guest with a coupon that’s either expired or has unseen limitations (such as not being able to be used with another offer). For a kitchen position, it might make sense to ask how a candidate might deal with a server who’s bringing a lot of guest issues to the kitchen’s attention during a rush.

It’s not the actual answers to such questions that matter as much as how candidates handle unexpected questions that put pressure on them to consider many factors — a parallel for what it’s like working in a busy restaurant during the rush.

Similarly, interviewers also can find out more about how candidates perform under pressure by asking them to prepare a basic dish or role-play certain steps of the guest service experience.

In the end, the goal is for restaurants to hire the best employees who are most likely to stay the longest. If a restaurant’s interviewing best practices aren’t carefully considered to improve the chances of hiring the right people, it’ll have devastating consequences on the entire business.

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Restaurant Interviewing: Strategies for Finding the Right People

August 3, 2019   NetSuite
gettyimages 686086924 Restaurant Interviewing: Strategies for Finding the Right People

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

To say that eating out has become an important part of American culture is putting it lightly. According to the National Restaurant Association (NRA), Americans spend just over half (51%) of their food dollars in restaurants.

That’s more than double the share spent on eating out in 1955, and it’s not a trend that’s slowing down. The NRA further predicts that restaurants will employ 16.9 million Americans by 2029, up from 15.3 million today.

In other words, restaurants are hiring more people than ever. Add in the industry’s eye-popping annual employee turnover rate, which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics pegged at 73% in 2016, and that equals a lot of interviews.

It also means that hiring the right people — those who can handle stress, represent your restaurant, and, perhaps most importantly, stick around a while — can reduce what is becoming a huge interviewing burden.

In fact, having a toolbox of interviewing best practices can help restaurant managers better manage their time, wade through candidates more efficiently, and, ultimately, run a more successful business. Drive this point home with your hiring team: we’re in a people business, and just happen to serve food.

Efficient Interviewing Strategies

Many restaurant positions are entry-level roles, which creates many challenges with finding the right people. Developing a clear interview strategy is imperative to quickly filter candidates and build your “A-team.”

What’s more, finding convenient times to interview candidates can be a challenge in a stressful, fast-moving restaurant environment. For these reasons, alternate interview approaches can prove effective for working through the growing number of candidates.

Some restaurants might consider using open interviews, in which a restaurant simply announces it will be interviewing during a given window of time, and anyone who wants to apply can just show up. Open interviews enable restaurant managers to interview a lot of candidates in a short time, without the need to coordinate appointments for days on end.

Another option is a group interview, in which a restaurant calls in several candidates and interviews them simultaneously, sometimes even having them perform some kind of collaborative task. This is a great way to see how people work under pressure and in team situations.

With both approaches, it’s best to conduct interviews either when the restaurant is closed or during gaps between rushes.

Most often, however, restaurants interview candidates individually, in which case the setting becomes a more important consideration. No restaurant wants to take up a table during peak hours for interviews, so if it’s necessary to conduct interviews while things are hopping, it’s helpful to identify a quiet place—such as a banquet room, an office or some other private space—where interviews can be conducted in confidence.

Ask Important Questions

Most interviews eventually come down to questions and answers. And whether a restaurant is hiring servers, kitchen staff or even managers, having good interview templates with pre-established questions by role can prove effective in not only simplifying the interviewer’s job, but also in ensuring they’re asking appropriate questions from a legal standpoint (check state and local laws) and avoiding discrimination.

Questions restaurant managers should ask prospective employees:

-Why do you want to work in the food service industry? (If a candidate doesn’t know how to answer this, it’s a red flag.)

-What do you know about our restaurant, and what makes you a good fit? (This is a great way to see if a candidate has taken the time to prepare.)

-What does the word “hospitality” mean to you? (A simple question that’s at the heart of good food service.)

-Can you provide an example of how you handle unhappy guests? (No restaurant gets it all right. How employees handle problematic scenarios could determine whether diners become — or remain — regulars.)

-How would you handle conflict with co-workers? (Restaurants are charged environments where paths cross constantly. There’s a significant possibility of conflict on any given day.)

-What were the best/worst restaurant experiences you’ve had, and why? (Candidates will reveal numerous strengths and weaknesses in answering this.)

-What are (or will be) your favorite/least favorite parts about working in restaurants? (This can tell a restaurant much about whether a specific candidate will fit into its culture.)

-How do you deal with high-pressure situations? (Candidates who can’t deal with pressure probably aren’t the best fit for restaurant work.)

-What does it mean to you to be part of a team? (Running a successful restaurant is a team sport.)

-How do you handle occasions when life makes it difficult to show up to work on time? (Hint: Candidates who don’t have an answer for this are much more likely to have punctuality issues.)

Homing in on the Gems

Once an interviewer’s gut feeling says that a candidate has potential, additional questions can help to validate whether the person is a good hire.

For instance, the interviewer might want to ask potential servers how they would handle a guest with a coupon that’s either expired or has unseen limitations (such as not being able to be used with another offer). For a kitchen position, it might make sense to ask how a candidate might deal with a server who’s bringing a lot of guest issues to the kitchen’s attention during a rush.

It’s not the actual answers to such questions that matter as much as how candidates handle unexpected questions that put pressure on them to consider many factors — a parallel for what it’s like working in a busy restaurant during the rush.

Similarly, interviewers also can find out more about how candidates perform under pressure by asking them to prepare a basic dish or role-play certain steps of the guest service experience.

In the end, the goal is for restaurants to hire the best employees who are most likely to stay the longest. If a restaurant’s interviewing best practices aren’t carefully considered to improve the chances of hiring the right people, it’ll have devastating consequences on the entire business.

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Finding Coeffients of the Product of Sums

May 3, 2019   BI News and Info
 Finding Coeffients of the Product of Sums

Is there any way to get Mathematica to find the coefficients of the product of sums? As an example (the problem I am trying to solve): Coefficients for a taylor expansion of $ e^{z^2}$ centered around $ z=1$ . We can write this as:
$ e^{z^2} = e^{(z-1)^2+2(z-1)+1} = \left(\sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{(z-1)^{2n}}{n!}\right)\left(\sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{2^n(z-1)^{n}}{n!}\right)e$ . I would like to find the coefficients of the above sum but written as just one sum over n.

Some analysis has led to find that we can write the above as: $ \sum_n^\infty \sum_{0 \leq 2m \leq n} \frac{e2^{n-2m}}{m!(n-2m)!}(z-1)^n$ , which is of the form I wanted. Is there any way for Mathematica to have found this?

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Finding the Right B2C E-Commerce Suite for Your Business

February 17, 2019   CRM News and Info

By John P. Mello Jr.

Feb 16, 2019 5:00 AM PT

This story was originally published on the E-Commerce Times on Nov. 27, 2018, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.

Digital transformation has become a prime focus for retailers these days. In order to grow, brick-and-mortar stores realize they must use their digital touchpoints to enhance their customers’ in-store experiences.

Online retailers recognize they need to separate themselves from the pack through faster and more informative shopping experiences. And omnichannel sellers and brands are aware they need to provide their customers with a seamless, cross-channel experience.

To meet the exigencies of digital transformation, retailers have been turning to business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce suites to automate their merchandising, streamline operations, and boost the impact of their business teams on the experience of their customers.

However, choosing such a platform can be difficult.

“It’s a very competitive space. Differentiation is challenging,” said Thad Peterson, a senior analyst with the
Aite Group, a global research and advisory firm based in Boston.

“It’s a maturing market, but some aspects of it are growing faster than the market as a whole,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “The home mobile side is growing more quickly — and in the developing world, it’s growing much, much more quickly.”

Level of Involvement

How much the business should be involved in the technical implementation and operation of the platform is one of the first questions a commerce platform shopper should consider, Gartner analyst Mike Lowndes suggested in a research note on digital commerce platform architecture. Gartner, a research and advisory company, is based in Stamford, Connecticut.

“If the business will be less involved, then a more packaged or single-vendor solution may be appropriate,” he wrote. “However, if IT organizations are to be involved in more than governance, leaders need to understand the high-level approaches available to make the best decision for the business.”

When examining a new digital commerce venture or replacing a legacy platform, organizations often search first for a digital commerce platform vendor before considering the impact of the vendor’s product architecture on their business and future needs, Lowndes wrote.

“Alternatively, this decision is placed in the hands of a development partner or system integrator on behalf of the business,” he added, “sometimes with unforeseen consequences to flexibility, future-proofing and fit for purpose.”

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

When shopping for a B2C e-commerce suite, the size of the purchaser is an important consideration.

“If you’re a sophisticated e-commerce provider with an IT group that does a lot of your Web development, then you don’t need a turnkey solution. You just need good cloud-based functionality and a good, secure platform that’s flexible so you can do what you need to do,” Aite Group’s Peterson explained.

“If you’re a small organization, you may need Web services, Web design and a lot of other things,” he continued. “If you’re smaller, you’re ceding more control to the provider. If you’re larger, you’re keeping more control to yourself.”

A recent
Forrester Wave report on B2C commerce suites notes, for example, that SAP Commerce Cloud is a suite suitable only for organizations with deep technical skills or a strong partnership with a system integrator.

“SAP commerce cloud is a best ft for companies looking for an industrial-strength full-function commerce platform in wide use across several industry verticals,” the report points out.

IBM’s Watson Commerce is another suite that requires technical chops to deploy, and IBM is also in the process of modernizing the solution’s architecture.

“IBM is a good fit for large enterprises with the budget, resources, and willingness to bet on the company’s ability to execute on its modern platform vision. Less mature organizations will likely find this suite too cumbersome,” Forrester concludes.

Important Considerations

At the start of the shopping process for a B2C suite, an organization has to evaluate what it sells. Is my product complex or is it simple?

“There are solutions that are better for selling simple products than complex products,” said Gartner Vice President Penny Gillespie.

Where a product is being sold is another important consideration.

“Some platforms do better selling locally and regionally than globally,” Gillespie told the E-Commerce Times.

For example, in Forrester’s report notes that Digital River’s commerce suite is a good fit for companies looking to expand globally and to outsource the transactional overhead of doing business internationally.

Forrester offers three general recommendations when shopping for a B2C suite:

  1. Make sure the suite contains the core set of features that drive a customer’s online experience — including search, personalization and promotions, and the analytics to tie those three elements together. The ability to target content and products with consumer incentives across the consumer’s shopping journey is essential to giving the consumer a differentiated shopping experience.
  2. Make sure the suite is agile enough to give business users the tools they need to rapidly change content. Business users need a 360-degree view of their customers, along with a promotions and campaign engine they can control, so they can attract customers and induce them to make purchases.
  3. Make sure the suite incorporates operational efficiencies that reduce costs and provide an upgrade process that requires little regression testing and no recoding. A containerized approach to upgrades that manages versions and automates scaling is critical to simplifying the upgrade cycle, as is the use of an abstracted API layer to isolate the commerce runtime from store customizations.

To Transform or to Optimize?

When purchasing a B2C suite, a buyer should understand the difference between a solution that’s going to optimize an organization’s performance and one that can transform it. A transformational solution is one prepared to deal with the future of e-commerce.

Just a scant six years ago, optimization was the driving force behind digital commerce investments, but that isn’t the case anymore, Gartner research shows.

“In 2012, customers were investing in digital commerce for cost savings. In 2017, it was about transformation and delivering great customer experiences,” Gillespie said.

“When I think about delivering a great customer experience, I think about delivering a personalized customer experience,” she continued. “And when I think about delivering a personalized customer experience, I think of content being relevant, my process being easy and seamless, and content that resonates with me.”

One characteristic of transformation is putting commerce in context. For example, the app for a furniture store will be able to show a consumer how a piece of furniture will look in a home, or a clothing store app will display how an item will look on the consumer.

Another characteristic is shifting from being reactive to a consumer’s wants to being proactive or anticipatory of them.

“Today, 99.99 percent of all transactions are initiated by customers,” Gillespie explained. “In the future, we’re going to see more and more transactions by merchants or suppliers based on what they know about the customer.”

Draw a Road Map

Commerce platform shoppers should create a road map for digital commerce and manage technologies based on the digital commerce technology ecosystem, Gillespie recommends.

“This will lead to a complete digital commerce solution, maximizing the value of both the commerce platform and the corresponding digital commerce ecosystem applications,” she said. “Organizations underestimate the requirements of a digital commerce solution. As a result, they deploy incomplete solutions that impede their journey to success.”

It’s important to scrutinize an IT vendor’s digital commerce platforms to ensure they match the road map and requirements, Gillespie advised, and to identify requirements delivered natively. “This can reduce unplanned spending on additional technology and lower integration costs.”

Develop a Short List

Commerce suites need to provide customers with more than just access to a company’s goods, observed Hayward, California-based Charles King, a principal analyst with Pund-IT, a technology advisory firm.

“It also needs to highlight and reinforce a company’s brand and go-to-market strategy,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

“Customization, search, personalization and support for company promotions are all critical parts of that process,” King added. “I’d also add that mobile transaction support and optimization is a critical issue for many, if not most, retailers — especially those in consumer markets.”

After performing its initial analysis, suite shoppers will need to create short list of prospects. When making that list, “first and foremost, invest time and effort in determining what your own organization hopes to accomplish with online commerce, along with developing realistic budgets and timelines,” King recommended.

“Then take a long and close look at primary vendors, along with whatever strategic partners — banks, hosted service providers, designers and such — are working behind the scenes,” he continued. “That includes examining a vendor’s existing sites, and arranging discussions with those customers.”

If a suite shopper operates in a particular industry, platform providers that focus on that industry should be good candidates for a short list of finalists.

“You need to understand your vertical,” said Aite Group’s Peterson, “and identify players with expertise in that vertical, so you don’t have to explain to them what you’re doing or adapt their technology to what you’re doing.”

Keep Your Eyes on the Target

As a shopper works down the list of candidates for a suite deployment, sales pitches can start to fog the shopper’s focus, but it’s crucial to keep what needs to be accomplished front and center, King advised.

However, “companies also need to determine how flexible or willing to compromise they can be on specific points,” he added.

“Realistically, it will be difficult to find a commerce vendor that’s a perfect 100 percent fit for your situation,” King continued, “but considering and remaining focused on your organization’s core requirements will go a long way to determining which B2C partners are worthy of serious consideration.”
end enn Finding the Right B2C E Commerce Suite for Your Business


John%20P.%20Mello%20Jr. Finding the Right B2C E Commerce Suite for Your Business
John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter
since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the
Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government
Security News
. Email John.

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Finding position of the maximum value of each subset

January 26, 2018   BI News and Info
 Finding position of the maximum value of each subset

I have the following set:

list = {{32/39, 1/5, 0, 0, 0}, {5/33, 3/5, 1/3, 0, 3/4}};

I need to find the position of maximum value from each subset.
I tried

Position[list, Max[list]]

and it gives the position {{1,1}}. But my result should be {{1,1}, {2,5}}/

2 Answers

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Finding Meaning At Work: Why Am I Doing This Job?

January 14, 2017   SAP
274693 low jpg srgb Finding Meaning At Work: Why Am I Doing This Job?

Everyone wants to find meaning at work, but many don’t, as recent research shows. But why does meaning matter, and what are its sources?

Nearly nine out of 10 employees in organizations worldwide don’t perceive their daily work as meaningful, a recent study has shown. That’s an alarming number, considering that the same research identifies meaning as a “root cause of innovation and corporate performance.” But when do people feel that their work is meaningful, and how can organizations and leaders help to create meaning?

Those were some of the questions addressed by renowned experts at the Future of Leadership Conference 2016 at the end of November. The conference was hosted by the non-profit Future of Leadership Initiative (FLI), which is dedicated to investigating modern leadership culture.

Luxury or business factor?

The FLI researchers surveyed people in 140 countries and found some astonishing results.

Organizations whose employees see their work as meaningful are around 21% more profitable. Their employees are more engaged and more persistent.

For 58% of employees – especially from the younger generation – a meaningful job is even more important than a high salary, the study reveals. Stefan Ries, chief human resources officer and member of the SAP Executive Board, knows this from personal experience: “Young people entering the job market ask us about meaning straight out and their choice of employer hinges on the answer.”

So it’s all the more alarming that 87% of the employees in the FLI survey don’t perceive their work as meaningful.

Sources of meaning at work

As the research verifies, people experience their work as meaningful when they feel they’re making an impact.

Giving employees autonomy also creates a sense of meaning. Dr. N. S. Rajan, former chief human resources officer and member of the group executive council of Tata Sons and author of the book Happiness at Work, explains: “It is very important for someone to have a meaningful say in what he or she does. When you have the empowerment and the autonomy to do it the way you best can do it, it makes you feel that you have really contributed.”

Ries agrees: “We have to say goodbye to traditional hierarchical leadership models. A manager needs to be more of a coach who occasionally makes you get out of your comfort zone. This is the only way to create innovation.”

A common understanding of values and goals is also critical. The more your own values tally with the company’s values, the more meaningful your job will seem. That’s why it’s crucial “to create a common understanding of the company’s strategy and vision, and to demonstrate how are you going to live this vision so that employees can see how it connects with their everyday work,” Ries continues.

But it’s not only about what you do, but who you do it with. An environment that fosters relationship building and an atmosphere of appreciation and trust creates a sense of belonging, which, according to Dr. Rajan, is another key factor for a fulfilling job.

Corporate responsibility in the digital age

What are meaningful corporate goals in an age where digitization is turning the world of work upside down and the exploitation of nature and the environment is advancing at an alarming pace?

John Elkington is a world authority on corporate responsibility and, in the 1990s, coined the term “triple bottom line.” Elkington, who is currently head of Project Breakthrough, a joint initiative with United Nations Global Compact, believes that the next 10 to 15 years are going to be among the most dangerous and high-risk that our species has gone through. At the same time, “if we can work out what we want to do, be very clear, engage the wider world, we can make it further and faster than we possibly imagine,” he explains.

But how can we tap the opportunities? According to Elkington, there is no time left for incremental changes. Instead, he urges exponential change, a radical mindset shift, and new business models that combine sustainability with profitability. In his opinion, the United Nations’ sustainability goals provide the framework for this.

This framework is also something that young people tend to subscribe to, he argues. “The global goals are like a purchase order from the future – as though the world of the 2030s is trying to reach back into today’s world to say, these are some of things we need,” he explains.

So it may be that this call from the future can also generate a sense of purpose. “Meaning is what I wish to be,” says Dr. Rajan. “That direction gives me a sense of purpose. That is true for organizations also.”

Profit or social engagement?

Both! In April 2016, SAP employee Irina Pashina took part in the social sabbatical program, where selected employees are given the opportunity to work in social enterprises and non-profit organizations in emerging markets and help solve specific business problems there.

Pashina worked at Arunodhaya, an Indian organization that strives to combat child labor and child poverty. She found three factors particularly motivating: to aim for a higher goal than meeting profit and quarterly targets, to sense the direct and tangible impact of her work, and to work independently and on her own initiative.

Pashina doesn’t believe economic success and social engagement are mutually exclusive: “By helping SAP to be successful, I can also contribute in a small way to making the world a better place.”

Today’s employees need flexibility to thrive. Learn How to Design a Flexible, Connected Workspace.

Article published by Andrea Diederichs. It originally appeared on SAP News Center and has been republished with permission.

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