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Analytics Centre of Excellence (CoE)

Drive innovation and accelerate insights by empowering your organisation with intuitive analytics capabilities

Analytics Centre of Excellence (CoE) at a glance:

  • A business-first approach that starts by identifying your goals, then applies analytics in ways that clearly support them
  • Skills across the analytics value chain to support your entire journey from data consolidation to innovative app deployment
  • Data, assets and ready-to-deploy capabilities delivered alongside one another to build a fully-equipped CoE from the ground up
  • Shared and scalable frameworks that can be applied by stakeholders across diverse lines of business
  • A structured governance approach where every stakeholder can give their input and ensure that your CoE delivers exactly what they need

Make analytics work for your entire organisation

Today, most organisations have started their journey with analytics – but few have been able to realise its full value and scale up to support the entire business.

To see the real value of analytics and ensure widespread adoption, organisations are moving beyond individual use cases and developing shared Centres of Excellence (CoEs) to help them:

  • Maximise the potential of organisational data by consolidating and integrating data silos and making it available to the wider business

  • Demonstrate real ROI from analytics use cases by applying them to immediate and strategic business challenges and goals

  • Embed analytics into their organisational culture and establish a ‘new normal’ by scaling applications to support everyone

  • Build common, shared frameworks and capabilities to enable the entire organisation to drive innovation using analytics

  • Reduce operational costs by better leveraging centralised data assets and pooled resources

We do more than just bring your data together…

We have skills, partnerships and capabilities that span the entire analytics value chain – from data engineering to application development. So, whether you’re building an Analytics CoE from scratch, or looking to strengthen an existing CoE with new capabilities, we can help. With Analytics CoE from The Smart Cube, you get:

  • A Business-First Approach
    A Business-First Approach

    Every project begins by identifying your most important business needs, to ensure our solution delivers maximum ROI right across the organisation.

  • A Unique Blend of Data and Assets
    A Unique Blend of Data and Assets

    We provide expertly curated data sets, and use both custom and ready-to-deploy tools to build the ideal solution for your organisation.

  • The Right People, with the Right Skills
    The Right People, with the Right Skills

    With skills across the analytics value chain, as well as in sector and functional domains, we fill your gaps in a precise, efficient way – providing only the people you need.

  • Intuitive Apps that Work for Everyone
    Intuitive Apps that Work for Everyone

    We build custom applications that are designed with your users in mind, to ensure the highest levels of adoption across your business.

  • Ongoing Governance and Communication
    Ongoing Governance and Communication

    We work closely with every stakeholder involved to ensure continuous improvement and maintain a joint focus on innovation.

How your business benefits

With the Analytics Centre of Excellence solution from The Smart Cube, you can:

  • Strengthen your CoE, your way and flexibly add whichever skills or capabilities you’re missing.
  • Create a strong foundation for analytics success and rapid experimentation to empower every team across the organisation.
  • Ensure widespread analytics adoption with solutions designed around your people, technology and goals.
  • Transform your operations across sales, marketing, purchasing, finance and supply chain with analytics-powered insights.
  • Accelerate analytics projects with reusable assets and frameworks, which bridge technical and commercial gaps.
  • Work with the technology you already have and evolve your capabilities.

How we work with you

Whatever stage you’re at in your analytics CoE journey, we’ve got the people, tools, data and capabilities to help you accelerate insight projects and empower every line of business.

Step 1

We conduct diagnosis and discovery workshops and interviews to define a clear view of your challenges, resources, priorities and unmet needs

Step 2

Specific teams are engaged to identify and deliver ‘quick win’ projects that establish the vision, technical foundation and success criteria for your CoE

Step 3

Engagement is expanded as we set up scalable processes and deliver the strategic solutions that form the core of your Analytics CoE

Step 4

We work closely with you on an ongoing basis to continuously innovate and improve your capabilities – and ensure your CoE delivers the right outcomes for all stakeholders

Why choose The Smart Cube?

When you choose Analytics CoE from The Smart Cube, you always get:

Expertise stretching across all lines of business: The Smart Cube provides bespoke insights to teams across sales, marketing, procurement, finance and more. We understand every department your CoE must serve, and how to translate their business problems into data-led solutions.


Close stakeholder collaboration and communication: We work closely with the people that will ultimately use the insights and tools provided by your CoE, ensuring that what we deliver meets real business needs.


Skills and data across the analytics value chain: Our capabilities span data consolidation/integration, reporting, visualisation, predictive and prescriptive modelling, and deep learning – leveraging multiple alternative datasets to enhance our insights.


Proven pre-built assets and frameworks: Benefit from our pre-built assets, including data transformation accelerators, visualisation templates, use case-specific algorithms, plus frameworks to prioritise analytics use cases, define business benefits, and track/measure ROI.


Complete technological freedom: We adapt to your tech stack, building solutions that align with the tools and technology you already have in place rather than introducing a new proprietary system.


A true extension of your CoE team: When you work with The Smart Cube, our team becomes yours. We can fill specific skills gaps with relevant experts, or manage your CoE entirely on an ongoing basis.


Analytics Centre of Excellence in action

Major UK retailer attributes benefits of £75 million over 4 years to enhanced capability across entire analytics value chain

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client sought an analytics partner to process huge volumes of data and bring efficiency in various aspects of the business, as well as taking end-to-end ownership from business challenge identification to solution development and maintenance.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube partnered with the client’s teams across multiple initiatives to streamline big data infrastructure by developing and deploying over 60 analytics solutions, including Pricing and Promo ROI, Space Planner and Range Optimiser. We streamlined MVP development and the scale-up process through our proprietary Concept Lab Framework, and set up a central analytics Centre of Excellence (CoE), driving CoE governance and operations jointly.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    The development of the client’s CoE capability across the analytics value chain and increased maturity of solution delivery to the business helped it realise benefits of £75 million over the last 4 years.

Analytics partnership identified potential growth opportunities worth $1.5 billion across EMEA, Americas and APAC

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client needed an analytics partner for its Global Insights and Channel Development teams to develop revenue growth strategy based on deep market data analytics for the Ready to Drink Coffee category globally.

  • OUR APPROACH

    We developed a 5-year global roadmap for growth covering 45 countries and helped set-up the CMI reporting capability for 17 markets. We built market sizing and forecast models, country prioritisation models and a consumer exploration tool, and evaluated category pricing strategy, NACP segmentation validation, and competitor strategies.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    We highlighted potential growth opportunities worth $1.5 billion across EMEA, Americas and APAC through channel expansion, product development and consumer base expansion.

Purchase price variance analysis identified $300 million in cash release opportunities

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client was looking to partner with an analytics firm to drive productivity and process adherence in multiple initiatives over the long term by collating data from over 200 production sites in more than 100 countries.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube helped the client in running a 5-year productivity programme by working with teams across Procurement Finance, Regulatory Reporting, Supplier Qualification and Risk, and Global Category. We analysed category spend, risk and sub-supplier data to create automated MS Excel and PowerBI dashboards to provide visibility into KPIs and identify measures to streamline processes, bringing price discipline and adhering to guidelines and practices.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    We helped the client generate $2 million in savings through purchase price variance analysis, provide visibility into $300 million cash release opportunity and improve supplier qualification process from 18% to 91% in 3 years.