OC&C bolsters data science consulting capabilities with Ugam partnership

OC&C Strategy Consultants has agreed a partnership with Ugam, a Mumbai headquartered leader in data and analytics. Leveraging Ugam’s data sources and advanced analytics capabilities, OC&C will be able to augment its strategy and business consulting services with deeper insights, empowering its clients to make better data-driven decisions.

According to, James Walker, Partner and Global Head of Analytics at OC&C Strategy Consultants, Ugam’s experience applying advanced data science in the e-commerce sector is something which aligns well with OC&C’s data-centric philosophy. With this firm foundation of cultural synergy, the duo will look to supply retail analytics to a sector which is struggling to overcome a sustained downturn in performance.

Walker added, “We seek to fuel strategy with data, giving clients creative, actionable strategies. Partnering with Ugam allows us to provide clients an even greater range of data sources, combining external competitor and customer data with internal, proprietary data. Together, we can deliver more comprehensive solutions that will benefit our clients.”

Ugam is a global professional services firm headquartered in Mumbai, India, which uses data and analytics to assist retailers, brands, B2B distributors and market research firms transform big data into valuable insights. The company’s unique managed service offering combines a proprietary big data technology platform with deep domain knowledge and analytics expertise to empower clients to make decisions that improve their business.

The partnership sees Ugam’s capabilities complement a number of in-house tools which OC&C already has developed internally. These include two tools which are deployable at “industrial strength” scale. First of all, a tool called SKU Rat for creating optimised assortments (stripping out low margin stock keeping units, or SKUs, that are cannibalising high margin SKUs) and stretched price ladders. Then, there is the aptly named Space Man, which aims to optimise micro and macro space allocation by store format (e.g. certain categories are generating low margin given their allocated space, and this can be reallocated to more productive categories.) The two firms also intend to develop tools around Promotions (Promo Plan), Location and Network, Category strategy (i.e. inter category decisions) and Category management (i.e.: intra category decisions) support, among other ideas.

Analytics

The news of the partnership comes as analytics-driven consulting is booming. Digital consumption has led to customers being less loyal to individual brands, and companies subsequently having to become more data-savvy to work out the best way to maintain their sales figures. As a result, demand for strategy consultants in the retail and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) arenas has spiked dramatically.

For Ugam, the partnership allows the firm to enlarge its base of its users and deliver more meaningful impact. Sunil Mirani, Ugam co-founder and CEO, elaborated, “OC&C’s business expertise is unmatched, making them the ideal collaborator in our effort to continuously deliver insights that give our clients a competitive edge. Our combined expertise will mutually accelerate our pace of innovation, developing new solutions and helping organisations use analytics to modernise their business strategies for the digital era.”

“We seek to fuel strategy with data, giving clients creative, actionable strategies. Partnering with Ugam, we can deliver more comprehensive solutions that will benefit our clients.”
_{– James Walker, OC&C}

At the same time, OC&C has prior experience in applying data for strategies, which this will further enhance. Previous examples include having helped a multi-country EMEA gas station and convenience store business develop their analytics capability, and supporting a large European retailer where OC&C were “doing” analytics at scale for them. This included looking at optimising the store’s Price/Promo/SKU mix as an integrated model. In line with this, the partnership will in primarily be leveraged by OC&C teams focusing on the retail, consumer goods, FMCG and ecommerce sectors, however OC&C also works with telecoms, media, technology, education and B2B clients.

Further remarking on the partnership, OC&C’s James Walker said, “We have a sizeable advanced analytics team of our own, based in London… [which] tends to work embedded into project teams, often working at client sites seamlessly with our strategy folks. For example, we just spent eight weeks working with a client, embedded into their marketing team, helping them optimise their Christmas and 2019 marketing plans. We're working with a gym chain, again embedded into their business, supporting them with customer analytics and pricing.”

One area which the partnership allows for future improvement of these services in is the Internet of Things. Walker concluded, “It’s these huge IoT data sets that actually the extra data handling capabilities of Ugam are interesting for. The Ugam resource is additional horsepower we have available when we need more resource, and their platform can help us with huge data sets on occasion, e.g.: IoT data. By teaming from time to time on projects, this also helps us in our relationship around building the new advanced tools.”

Related: OC&C Strategy Consultants closes seven transactions in private equity.