5one are seeking an academic partner and a PhD student for an Industrial Mathematics Internship.

Description of proposed work plan

The set of products that a retailer stocks in its stores is known as its assortment. Any changes to a store’s assortment need to be carefully planned as they could have a major impact on the sales and profitability of the retailer.

The loss of any product from the assortment (due to a lack of availability or de-listing) carries a risk of lost sales even if it is replaced by another product and so it is important to understand the impact of change to the assortment.

Transferred Demand as defined here is the prediction of the movement and substitution of sales from product to product when changes in assortment are made to a category within a grocery retailer.

The aim of this internship is to help 5one develop the methods in Transferred Demand to initially look at impact on individual product sales, moving to category sales and finally to store sales. An important link to investigate will be how Transferred Demand varies by type of customer. It is anticipated that the methods explored will be Bayesian probability and the key areas we are interested in are how demand changes when the attributes of the category change (as defined by the attributes of the products in the category).

Which parts of the company will the Intern become familiar with?

5one is a customer marketing consultancy. The intern will become familiar with the client services team – who are responsible for managing all client relationships analysis team, the analysis team – who are responsible for all bespoke insight projects and implementation of methods and with the research and development team – who are responsible for the development of all methods in the business, web applications that deliver the methods and the databases that support the applications.

Duration of the project:
6 months

Company location
Hammersmith, London

Industrial supervisor
Ian Scholey

For more details and to apply for this internship, please email Dr Vera Hazelwood at the Industrial Mathematics KTN.

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