Andy Harper
Littlewoods
Littlewoods Home Shopping Group, based in Liverpool, has one of the largest internal Operational Research departments in the United Kingdom. Main project areas include Operations and Distribution, Merchandising Strategy, Credit Management and Marketing. I joined the Marketing section in September 1997.
Having graduated with a degree in Electronic Engineering in 1989, and then worked in various financial institutions in London, I returned to university in 1996 to study for an MSc in Operational Research.
Projects that I have worked on include the building of a decision tree to allow a more profitable selection of existing customers, analysis into the way in which people are selected for recruitment mailings, and forecasting future trading behaviour of customers.
I have found that, as a member of the OR department, one is given the freedom, and actively encouraged, to meet clients, and find out about different areas of the business. This engenders a definite feeling of involvement in the company, and a desire to learn more.
The thought of returning to university as a mature student was a little daunting, as well as extremely exciting, especially since I had chosen to move into a field in which I had no experience, and which I understood to be primarily a younger person’s career. However, everything has turned out rather well, and I am very glad that I did it (written late 1990s). A spell in the Financial Services department at Littlewoods, analysing the insurance product that what was the main bringer of insurance income/profit, and five years, later…
For the last five years I have been working for Winterthur Insurance in Switzerland. Winterthur is the insurance part of Credit Suisse, acquired by the latter some years ago, in an attempt to combine the offering of banking and insurance products to customers. The looked-for synergies never emerged, and Winterthur will be floated on the Swiss stock exchange, perhaps as early as June of this year (2006). Winterthur is the largest insurer in Switzerland; the country that has the largest per capita spend on insurance in the world.
The OR department was at one time part of an international Customer Relationship Management (CRM) group within Winterthur. One idea of this was to allow the sharing of analytical knowledge and experience between the larger European countries in which Winterthur was present: Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Spain and England (Churchill – it was Winterthur that financed the founding of Churchill). This international group was dissolved, and the countries now work independently, at least where OR is concerned.
The Operations Research department is part of Marketing. We are at the moment 1.5 FTE. We perform ad hoc customer and product analyses for miscellaneous departments, create targeting models for direct marketing campaigns, and have created a customer value model, which is slowly finding an audience.
We work with SAS for Windows and Excel, and are lucky enough to have a data warehouse that was specifically built for CRM, containing information drawn from the main insurance areas: non-life, life and (soon) health. This being the only database within Winterthur that allows a customer-centric view to be taken, we have in the past couple of years been fortunate to gain many new internal customers, which is very pleasing. In the future more data, and hopefully more internal customers, will be added to the database.
Update July 2009: I stayed three more years at what is now AXA Winterthur, and have very recently (yesterday) started work as a Consultant for a Business Intelligence company in Zürich.
In case anyone is remotely interested to find out more, my email address is shown on my home page in the Members' Resources section of www.theorsociety.com.
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