OpEx Society – Egypt Chapter – 14 January 2017 Meeting
In this issue:
– Big Data & Internet of Things (IOT)
– Budgeting in Turbulent Economy
Big Data & Internet of Things
It’s been a challenge for all those dealing with Data, Information and Knowledge on how to manage them into the form that facilitates decision making. The beginning was dealing with facts; storing and retrieving them, then manually analyze and process them into output of graphs or trends to give indications for human to take decisions. This was called Information Systems Management. Every year we face new terms and names of different Application Service Provider (APS) as Hotmail, cloud etc along with new software to facilitate analysis of data as Excel 2013 . After the invasion of social media into our lives, it became evident that input have changed from structured facts and numbers into unstructured input of words, views and impressions. Thus the need to analyze them moved us to the level of Management of Information and Communication Technology.
Internet of Things: Cutting Edge Technologies
Big Data has huge magnitude, deals with live timely stream of opinions, views and all other forms of unstructured data. Analysis of Big Data has been the key to analytics based decisions making in the last few years.
You can imagine How Big Data is if realized that Facebook over a year was generating 25 terabytes of log data every day (Facebook log data reference: http://alowww.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/17/ok-inside-facebooks-data-center/) and probably about 7 to 8 terabytes of data that goes up on the Internet. Facebook has been adding more than 600,000 new users a day in recent months.
Budgeting in Turbulent Economy
1. Budgeting is important as it translated the objectives of 
the company into financials. On other words provide the resources needed to produce and make profit.
2. Budget means putting into consideration inputs from all departments; production team advise cost and prices of raw material and other components of production, marketing survey the market and recommend a competitive price and cost of related marketing activities, sales advise realistic no of sales to make it profitable, HR advise no of human resources to implement the plan etc..
3. The process usually takes 2-3 months maximum from setting and compiling these inputs into obtaining the management endorsement or redo it according to the management decisions. This year it took us more time and we had to set the budget several times as a result of devaluation of the Egyptian Currency and the resulted impact on prices of imported raw material, surveying local market for alternative of the imported components. Etc…
4. It’s a complex process not only affected by domestic financial changes but global economy changes and buying trends thus it’s wise or even a must to expand your area of study and set a number of scenarios of your budget based on a range of selling price and monitor on daily and weekly and monthly.
5. Besides Market Surveys and studying buying trends, we must use all our analytical tools to forecast new areas of demand as well as make every effort to reduce the production cost to the least possible minimum. No room for WASTE these days.
Study Key Players or Consumers of a certain commodity or raw material can indicate and forecast a certain trend of consumption.
For example China has been the biggest consumer of Metals during the period from 2000 to 2014 consuming around 47% of metals worldwide.
