
Why Financial Planning Is Exciting at Least for a Data Scientist - eaguyhn
https://eng.uber.com/financial-planning-for-data-scientist/
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stevesimmons
I'm always surprised at the lack of interest in modelling business processes
here on HN.

This blog post from Uber is a case in point: 19 hours after posting, there are
still zero comments.

When I started my career 25 years ago, I was a junior management consultant
and often had to model the impact of the major corporate changes we proposed
to our clients. One example I remember well was figuring out how a bunch of
reengineering initiatives would change the work done across a network of 1000
retail bank branches. I built an Excel model that figured out branch-level
workloads, proposed changes to the number and function of branches, and then
presented the personnel, real estate and operational cost impact...

I am sometimes curious how these types of models would be built today. My
natural assumption (as a data scientist) would be use Python in a Jupyter
notebook to do it all. However, my attempts at web searches for examples of
business modelling techniques never return anything relevant.

Maybe someone reading this (from BCG/McKinsey/Pwc/etc?) can explain how they
model the impacts of large scale business change?

~~~
p33p
It really depends on the business model. There are some tools out there for
some financial forecasting, but IMO, most are too specialized to do what
you’re referring. Ultimately, things haven’t changed much. Most large
corporations are still using these excel models to do the exact same thing.

