A team of five LMU M.S. in Business Analytics students placed third out of 297 teams (574 participants globally) in the RMDS Lab Data Science Competition. They also received the “Rising Star Award” and considerations for internship positions with RMDS Lab.
RMDS Lab is a global ecosystem that empowers data science professionals and businesses to achieve successful, data-driven results.
For this year’s competition, students were tasked with developing an analytics dashboard to improve restaurant performance. As food deliveries and online reservations have become increasingly popular, restaurants have had to adapt and utilize digital and data technologies in order to stay relevant and survive.
The “LMU MSBA Lions” team, featuring Arshak Mkhitaryan, Monami Mukherjee, Grace Ouyang, Jonathan Ting and Krissy Wong, developed a dashboard utilizing Tableau, Excel and Python with the goal of finding areas for potential success if a restaurant owner were to expand into a new location. They accomplished this by compiling and cleaning a plethora of data sources that included L.A. County census data, Yelp data and L.A. County Covid data. With this data, they created a dashboard that showcased competitive restaurants within a certain area, Covid risk and demographics to give restaurant owners insights into which areas may best be suited for them.
Professor Kala Seal, who served as faculty advisor to the team, was especially proud of the way they approached the problem.
“Business analytics is not what you can do with data, but what data can do for your business – and that is exactly the way our team approached the restaurant problem,” said Seal. “Working with real data can be a challenge and the students proved how simple visualizations with location-based analyses can unlock data insights and connect it to business decisions for restaurants.”
The team is grateful to Professor Seal for his support and guidance as well as Professor Sijun Wang for giving them the opportunity to enter the competition. The experience has been a highlight of their MSBA program thus far.
“Having the opportunity to take what we learned in the classroom and apply it in a real-world situation truly adds value to our education at LMU,” said Jonathan Ting. “Anyone who has worked in a team setting can relate to stressful deadlines, late-night coffee hours, and the overall confusion of putting something together from scratch. However, when everything comes together and you cross that finish line, it’s a really great thing to experience alongside your friends and teammates.”
Arshak Mkhitaryan agrees that the best way to learn is through solving real-world problems.
“We really got our hands dirty by cleaning messy real-world data, managing tight deadlines, organizing effective collaboration within the team, and presenting our findings by building a sophisticated dashboard in Tableau,” he said. “I’m already looking forward to the next challenge so I can use everything I’ve learned to make the world a better place in the spirit of LMU’s mission.”
View award ceremony clip.