Crunching Data To Analyse Business Potential And Success

M76 has helped enterprises build solutions and business strategies with big data and mathematical excellence at its core. It has expanded well beyond its flagship technology research to provide senior leaders across the enterprise with the indispensable business insights, advice and tools they need to achieve their mission-critical priorities and build the organisations of tomorrow.

“We, at M76 analytics, are iconoclasts. Unlike the traditional philosophy of not reinventing the wheel, we prefer reinventing the wheel because it helps us develop differentiating features in our product and control the final product performance. It is just this philosophy which helped us build business context-sensitive AI algorithms,” said Jai Mrug, the CEO of M76 Analytics.

Jai Mrug, an entrepreneur, is a known election analyst, and psephologist in India, since 1998.   Armed with B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Bombay and a post graduation from the School of Management, IIT Bombay, his focus on Operations and Market Research led him to set up M76 Analytics.

Mrug has worked on several aspects of data, more often than not, taking up numeric challenges that would represent deep data mining and metric quantification. Even before the AI boom began, he had a parallel career in data analytics while pursuing his mainstream career in Enterprise Solutions.

The company assists clients in Quantifying Business Phenomena, making Intelligent Business Recommendations, and creating elegant analytic solutions. Irrespective of the stage of data reliance of the clients, M76  analyses opportunities, risks, and related costs based on the end-to-end data modelling capabilities.

“Our rigour for perfection and insistence on solving a business problem and not necessarily being obsessed with developing front end visualisation is something that makes our clientele come back to us for more and more solutions,” says Mrug.

The solutions the company provides have digital transformation at its root. Key business objectives such as demand shaping, pricing analysis, inventory management, process optimisation, and risk management are all outcomes of this digital transformation.

It also provides a unique visualisation that combines assessing the root cause of a business phenomenon and its quantified business Impact. The systems are geared to arrange these in a particular order that the business may seek to evaluate. They can alert the stakeholders regarding slippages in the process parameters and their impact on business measures.

The M76 platform is basically a Business Strategy Workspace. These workspaces use inference and interactivity driven decision support systems as the foundation. One of the initial prototypes that the firm carried out for its customers was for a large asset management company. The team worked through many innovative metrics to help them obtain the right root cause for a certain business phenomenon they were encountering. When the COO saw those, he just exclaimed, “you have opened our eyes,” says Mrug.

For one of India’s large non-life Insurer, M76 has developed propensity models to enhance revenue from the existing customer base. For a state government in India, M76 has developed models to analyse the effectiveness of their public welfare schemes.

Mrug was the consultant to a well-known English news channel, for all number crunching related to elections, right from the channel’s inception in 2006. He has conceptualised and developed some of the most innovative analytic properties that crunch live election results to draw immediate insights.

So far, the entire organisation has operated on a self-funded model while seeking temporary seed fund assistance from SINE, the business incubator of IIT Bombay, which was subsequently returned. Since mobilising talent initially was a challenge given the scarce resources, the company always worked with young graduates fresh from college.

Mrug explains that soon the talent was groomed in-house, and the challenge of expensive lateral talent was met with sufficient bandwidth from those who took to their first job with great passion. This was, in a way, an adventure in the substitution of experience with process and passion. It has now started paying off.

The company filed two patents last year with the USPTO in the space of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It is now on the way to productising those patents.