Current role: Advanced Analytics and Data Science Lead - Finance
Current organisation: Woolworths
Last role at PwC: Data Analytics Director
Time at PwC: 2003 - 2013 & 2014 - 2020
Information current as of 10 May 2022.
What’s the one career achievement you’re most proud of?
I’m proud that I’ve made decisions throughout my career to prioritise my family. Whilst at PwC I made the most of the 18 weeks paid parental leave for my first two kids (granted - not a hard decision!) and now at Woolies I work a four-day week with a day to hang out with my 6-month-old and catch up on some not-so-glamourous life admin. It has also been the many little decisions of “now I will close my laptop lid” or “no, I’ll reply to that tomorrow”. Doing this while still kicking some goals on the career front has been great.
What’s been your biggest career challenge and how have you overcome it?
Back when I was young (ie 25ish…) with no kids and an equally busy wife, I set a benchmark for the number of hours I would happily give PwC each week in return for my salary and the chance to work with amazing people on some really interesting projects. As kids came along and life outside work became busier, I needed to become more productive and think much more carefully about how I spent my time - as time had become my most scarce resource.
Now, I try to restrict my 'work-life' into a box that has a '9 to 5pm, four days a week' shape - which is REALLY hard when you’re passionate about your job. However, regularly reflecting on what is important to me (holistically) and chatting about this with my colleagues and friends helps me validate that I’ve got the mix mostly right.
What’s the most valuable lesson you learnt during your career at PwC and how has that helped you get to where you are today?
PwC taught me to be brave and ask the question that everyone else is thinking - even if it appears too simplistic. This has helped me to grow the ability to 'cut through' to the heart of the issue. Also, drafting all of those engagement letters (or conversely being hospital-passed a project with a vague engagement letter) helped me to understand the importance of being clear on scope and responsibilities!
What was your dream job ‘growing up’ and why?
I wasn’t much of a long term planner growing up. PwC was my first real job that I started in 2003 as a trainee. Mid-way through 2002 in year 12 at high school I was forced by my mum to call the grad recruitment team to beg them to accept me, late, into the trainee interview process after she had discovered from the mum of one of my soccer teammates about how “little Johnny had applied to all of the big four already… la di da”. Phew! Thanks Mum! Luckily I had a sympathetic recruiter on the other end of the phone!
During my late-20’s I wanted to be a Data Scientist (is it still the sexiest job description? I feel like that was a self-appointed title). I’m currently midway through a Masters of Data Science at UNSW and the job that I’m in would be pretty close - it’s a combo of data science/analytics, finance/accounting and commercial acumen.
How are you and your business making a difference for your customers, employees and society?
Not so much Woolies related, but I’ve been a board member of the Barbara May Foundation for 6 years now (which funds maternal care in sub-Saharan Africa). This was an opportunity presented to me through the PwC 'Onboard' program and I’ve happily continued in my Director and Audit Chair Committee role since leaving PwC. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to serve the impoverished women of Africa.
In what ways does Woolworths use artificial intelligence as part of its data analysis processes?
The 'customer' of my team is Woolies Finance (~800 people) and many of the deliverables of Woolies Finance revolve around complete and accurate financial reporting and analysis to the market and our stakeholders.
With the billions of records of customer transactions and journal line items flowing through our systems, it's so important that we take a data-driven approach to identify and resolve anomalies and exceptions.
We’ve been exploring the use of machine learning algorithms (isolation forest models most recently) to detect anomalies in our financial data that are addressed or explained by the business before it hits the month-end results. We’re now exploring methods to generalise this approach so that it can detect anomalies on 'fresh populations' of financial data and do a better job of explaining what might have triggered the anomaly to be flagged.
As Australia’s largest chain of supermarkets, how has Woolworths used data analytics to attract and retain customers?
Woolies has one of the biggest commercial data sets in Australia. 70 million baskets of groceries walked out of our stores in January 2022. That’s a lot of history upon which to make predictions about the future!
We also have a strong customer loyalty program (Everyday Rewards card) which allows us to track buying patterns of our customers over time and see how people respond to price changes/promotions. This allows us to optimise the range (the selection of products we put on shelves) for the demographic of customers in a store’s location, build out effective promotional calendars and also build a strong recommendation engine when you shop on our website (I love the 'Have you forgotten?' feature - I always seem to forget bread…).
What do you believe will be the next trend in data analytics and how does Woolworths plan on capitalising on this?
Data analytics at the moment is often an 'end point'. Whilst it might inform a decision or guide an action, we (the data analytics community) haven’t yet nailed how we create a feedback loop and feed the 'implemented decision or action' back into the model so that the model (and we) can learn and make better future predictions.
In my team right now we’re building models where predictions can be fed into a finance process and immediately validated by the end user to then improve the accuracy of our model.
