Sprint Milestone: Thought-leaders and Experienced Practitioners in Data Analytics Space

Following the disruptive events of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are increasingly embracing the significance of using data and analytics to lower costs, enhance customer experience, and optimize processes that will accelerate their digital business initiatives. However, achieving desired business results in today's heavily connected world requires a high-performance blend of humans with AI, automation tools, data science, and governance. Often, companies underestimate the complexities of data and end-up missing opportunities to align themselves with the current paradigm shift of rapid digitalization. Many small to medium-sized organizations have approached data analytics opportunistically, setting up discrete automation capabilities to uncover key insights about past performance and effectively influence how business decisions should be made in the future. While this incremental approach has proven effective, a significant number of companies now find they need to unify their disparate analytics efforts under a single program for all common pain points in their data management strategy. Uniquely positioned to support this growth, Sprint Milestone strives to enable businesses of all sizes to efficiently access clean data and accumulate these insights through a combination of low-code, self-service tools and analytic services. The data management advisory firm consists of experts specializing in Data Warehouse, Analytics, AI & Automation that help customers leverage data and produce insight-driven decisions and business strategies to translate KPIs into success. With business operation decisions becoming increasingly automated and augmented, engineering decisions with data provide the opportunity for organizations to create successful corporate strategies consistently. "As the digital world goes into further automation, we provide thought-leadership and cutting-edge technology that help humans orchestrate their people, systems, and machine learning programs to solve business problems," explains Khai San Banh, CEO and Co-Founder of Sprint Milestone.

Proactive Orchestration of Agile Analytics

Today, most data analytics companies in the market provide either strategy consulting services or analytics tools to solve business problems. What differentiates Sprint Milestone from other competitors is that its experts integrate strategy consulting with tools and accelerators to help companies implement its recommendations for dynamically generating insights customized to a user's needs. Furthermore, the company has a first-hand understanding of the client's challenges and experience in embedding analytics into their daily operation to achieve their revenue and cost targets. Unlike many other boutique consulting firms, its team has worked in large analytic organizations and major financial institutions with over 80 years of combined experience supporting customers across the Asia Pacific region.

"As a consultant, it is our responsibility to become a trusted advisor and actively listen to ensure we understand our client's pain points, provide advice and recommendations to enable them to make informed decisions through data," adds Khai San.

With a focus on customer enablement, experts at Sprint Milestone aim to identify the best technologies and practices that will disrupt a customer's value chain by generating new use cases. The company applies proven principles to de-risk, accelerate design, and support the implementation of effective operating models to control IP and quality from rapid prototyping to version release with a key focus on change management. "Using our unbiased view of technology, and high managerial experience in industry, we assess strategic gaps and help shape the future vision of organizations," says Akihiko Katayama, Co-Founder of Sprint Milestone. Its experts work closely with clients to align their KPIs and develop successful strategies as the surge in data caused by rapid digital disruption has made it a challenge for businesses with outdated data modeling to understand customer needs and generate actionable insights going forward. Using its extensive experience in AI and analytics, Sprint Milestone supports leading global companies to become more AI-Driven and drastically increase the value of their data using rapid prototyping across any AI or analytics platform for speedy delivery cycles. The company offers a range of AI tools such as Dataiku, TigerGraph, and DataRobot that enable them to automate, build and implement predictive analytic models into their business processes. Additionally, it also provides training, coaching, and end-to-end services that cover the entire data lifecycle to enable its clients to build their own teams and custom analytics capabilities.

To further illustrate the proficiency of Sprint Milestone's services, Khai San cites a case study where a large regional bank had an operational risk nightmare using predefined excel tables and inefficient manual time-intensive processes that caused discrepancies in the financial reconciliation process. The bank sought a data analytics solution that would help ease workflow orchestration and reduce time-intensive tasks and errors in the ledger. Sprint Milestone worked with the bank to design and set up the reconciliation process using tools that would minimize human intervention and introduce risk tolerances throughout the process to alert users of issues and how these could be addressed through a proof of concept. As a result, it reduced time and effort to reconcile FX trades, improved accuracy and match rates, full data lineage, and reporting capabilities. Starting with two use cases in financial reconciliation and regulatory reporting, the regional bank has expanded Sprint Milestone’s tools, approach and techniques over the years to several hundred data management processes across its Asia Pacific branches.

Creating an Analytics Culture by Building a Data-Driven Community

Owing to the black swan events of COVID-19, the disciplines and practices around data science, big data, and advanced analytics have established themselves as vital business tools.

That said, data analytics is now a core function instead of a secondary focus and is managed by an independent team. Furthermore, the field of data analytics is advancing at a breakneck pace in the current scenario, impacting businesses of all sizes from democratizing technologies to developing innovations around the cloud, new AI capabilities, and much more. However, many companies, particularly those with roots in the pre-digital era are still struggling to adopt and implement data-led strategies while retaining market share in the face of sleeker, disruptive competitors for whom data is part of their DNA. Whilst being profitable, founders of Sprint Milestone, Aki Katayama and Khai San Banh, spotted an opportunity to ‘democratize’ existing software to help businesses of all sizes select, implement and operate the data analytics technology. “When we co-founded the company, our goal was to build an ecosystem in Asia that allowed analytics and talent to be more easily accessible to all businesses,” states Khai San. The pair were colleagues at a large global bank and shared the passion for using data analytics to enable businesses to leverage crucial insights and achieve profitable growth.

Since its inception in 2013, Sprint Milestone has been strongly committed to its vision of building a community around its colleagues, business partners, and clients. The idea of tending a garden is a good analogy for a community, gardens can develop with fertile ground, but they can suffer if neglected. Promising communities are the same; it needs to be nurtured. Continuing to digitally connect, up-skill, and attract passionate, like-minded individuals in a community will enable organizations to work collaboratively on solving analytical problems and find better ways to address business questions by optimizing data engineering processes. “In short, every organization is a member of the digital economy, so by building a better community, we help both clients, their business partners, and our employees be better prepared for the future of work,” elucidates Aki.

Today, Sprint Milestone operates in 13 countries, with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, and plans another base in Cambodia. Across these territories, it currently has over 100 customers, covering sectors including financial services, industrials, and B2C. Going forward, the company is exploring insights-as-a-service modules to offer its smaller clients access to data and obtain timely decision-making insights without the high infrastructure costs or recruitment costs to attract, train, and retain data scientists. In terms of technology, Sprint Milestone expects that data virtualization will be a huge boost for its growth, as well as data management and analytics orchestration. With extensive business processes across different functional areas in an organization set to be automated in the near future, expect companies like Sprint Milestone to be at the helm of orchestrating it seamlessly.