Stellenbosch University and Shoprite partnership empowers first cohort of data science graduates

• Students accessed a dataset of 14 million sale transactions
• Continuous mentorship by engineers from the Shoprite Group
• Access to large datasets and the infrastructure needed to handle such data

A long-standing partnership between Stellenbosch University (SU) and the Shoprite Group has enabled the first cohort of graduates in the Data Science programme to engage with real life business challenges from the retail industry.

For their final year project in the Computer Science Division, for example, Günther Tonitz and Steffan Schoonbee tackled the hard question of promotional timing:  When is the right time to promote which item, and for how long?

“We quickly realised the much more difficult question was whether items on promotion actually lead to success from a retail perspective,” explains Günther. In other words, if a customer buys five of the same items on promotion – what is known as pantry stocking – it may mean that they are not going to buy that product again for the next five months.

In another scenario, called off-target shopping, a customer may buy a promotional item, such as a soft drink, and then add a few bags of chips (that are not on promotion) for throwing a party, Steffan adds.

Which approach then, can be defined as a success?

To answer this question, the students were given access to two years’ worth of data from one of the Shoprite Group’s supermarkets.  It included 16 000 articles, equating to 78 000 promotional combinations. This dataset was further enhanced with stock movement data over a nine-month period, covering 18 000 articles. The dataset contained over 1 million stock movements.