Ms. Smith (your participating client) operates a restaurant in the busy downtown College Park, which is going smoothly and steadily. There are critical business decisions to be made about running a restaurant, and customers’ satisfaction is the most important key to success. Many customers have written various reviews and posted numerous photos on the social network about her restaurant. Now, Ms. Smith welcomes any helpful insights to make her popular restaurant more successful.
You and your friends have started a company (give it a cool name) for business intelligence and data analytics. Ms. Smith recently heard about the power of business intelligence and data analytics. In order to help Ms. Smith advance her business to the next level, you will need to collect and analyze review data about Ms. Smith’s restaurant to generate business insights, and present the findings to her so she may make effective improvements decisions.
The competition is open to all Smith undergraduate students in all programs. Students will need to form a team of two to four members to compete. Teams will go through the process of signup, tryouts, eliminations, and the final competition. The final presentation will be five minutes at the TechFest on Thursday April 15 by using ONLY Microsoft Excel. KPMG will present financial awards to top three teams ($70 to $120 per student depending on the final competition outcomes).
Please complete the student signup form. The earlier you signup, the more time you will have to prepare. Participants will be invited to join Discord to interact with organizers, mentors and other participants.
First round:
After signing up as a team, you will be provided with sample Yelp review data as two spreadsheets in an Excel file. The dataset contains 18,105 reviews for 298 restaurants around the University of Maryland, College Park between years 2006 and 2016. Your team shall analyze a restaurant, restaurants of a cuisine, or restaurants in an area in this sample dataset. You will submit an Excel file and a presentation file of your findings, discussions, and possible conclusions by March 25, 2021.
The top six teams with the most relevant and successful results of the first round will continue onto the second round.
Second round:
Each team shall identify a running restaurant or business in College Park. The organizer will guide the team to apply analytical methodologies to download, mine and analyze the Yelp and/or real world reviews on the restaurant/business chosen above.
On April 2, the teams will present their findings to a team of judges from KPMG, who will select the top three teams for the final round, based on, but not limited to, two criteria: (1) how insightful the analyses are; and (2) how impactful the presentation is. Each team will have ten minutes and use an Excel file with a presentation file of slides.
Final round:
At the TechFest 2021 (5-6:40PM, Thursday April 15, 2021), the three finalists will present their analyses and recommendations to the general audience and KPMG judges. Each team will have five minutes for a presentation using only an Excel file, followed by five minutes of Q&A. The winning team will be announced at the conclusion of the competition.
Questions and comments, please email to Prof. Adam Lee or Prof. John Bono.