I'm using an intern from the Data Analytics graduate program at SMU, not for search but to support improvements in a new acquisition. She is mainly working in Excel, creating automated tools and creating and manipulating data. For example, she created a vendor scorecard that pulls data from multiple sources and a tool that tells an employee the best vendor to use based on their published pricing, area of service, and duration of service needed. She has also created a lot of data that we needed for our ERP implementation,

We are working on a few ways to do this “as a service”. All of these tools are pretty good but they still require time to properly use them and you typically need to combine a few different products to research and then execute your outreach.