Paras Gupta
Founder & CEO, Day5 Analytics
Joe Brown
Director of Building Technology, KingSett Capital
Day5 Analytics advances organizations to extract value from their data with machine learning and AI.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are popular concepts — and rightly so, given our increasingly data-driven economy. As organizations advance towards making data intelligence a key part of their business model, it is becoming clear that collecting data is one thing, but effectively deploying it is another. Many companies have large stores of data collected over multiple decades, but face knowledge and expertise gaps when it comes to organizing, assessing, and leveraging their data to enhance the bottom line.
Enter Day5 Analytics, a Mississauga, Ontario-based data analytics firm founded in early 2020. Though the company is young, it’s already making waves in the analytics and consulting world with major projects that target decades-old data sets for established companies. “Our mission is to accelerate clients towards getting the most value out of their data sets,” says Day5’s CEO, Paras Gupta. “Companies today are at varying stages of data maturity. Our goal is to get them to a point where they can really start exploiting AI and machine learning technologies.”
KingSett Capital deploys dashboards to identify cost efficiencies
The Day5 team works primarily in a consulting and educational capacity for companies looking to accelerate their data maturity while upskilling employees. Their work often involves finance and energy applications: two areas rife with massive, disjointed data sets that require time-consuming manual processing. KingSett Capital — a private equity group with interests in an $18.4 billion portfolio of assets — recently sought Day5’s services to improve their day-to-day operations and drive high-quality returns for their investors.
“We found, as many do in the smart building revolution, that while plenty of data exists, it tends to be siloed,” says Joe Brown, Director of Building Technology at KingSett Capital. “We’ve been working with Day5 to pull data from different sources, starting with our energy bills, to improve oversight and analysis through user-centric dashboards. We wanted to take our data out of third-party storage and tie it in with other data that we have, to find hidden insights.”
Now, KingSett Capital is at the point where they have deployed automated energy reporting. “Thanks to our work with Day5, our data is now stored in a living format that’s updated in real-time,” says Brown. “We save days of processing time and can more easily identify energy efficiency opportunities which drive the bottom line.”
The 80/20 reality of data management
Day5 Analytics’ name comes from a common theme in data science: 80 percent of the time is spent on collection and preparation of data, while the remaining 20 percent is devoted to analyzing it to drive value. Using the metaphor of a work week, the first four days are for gathering and organizing data, while day five is when machine learning happens. Drawing on this framework, Day5’s systematic approach first enhances organizations’ data processes and competencies, before extracting value using advanced techniques.
To this end, Day5 collaborates with major academic players in data science — including Smith School of Business at Queen’s University, the first university in Canada to launch a master’s degree in the management of data analytics. “We want to be at the forefront of technological innovation,” says Gupta. “A lot of the unique opportunities we offer clients come straight out of academia. We skip the red tape between academic innovations and corporate monetization.”
