The Center for Organizational Analytics is partnering with HanesBrands to offer the 2018 Elon Champion® Analytics Challenge for Elon University undergraduate and graduate students. The competition is sponsored by the School of Communications, the College of Arts & Sciences, and the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business.

The goal of the Elon Champion® Analytics Challenge is to provide students with an opportunity to build and demonstrate their data analytics and visualization skills to professionals in the data analytics community. Teams will work closely with a faculty mentor, who will provide guidance and feedback.

We encourage students from all disciplines to apply for this challenge.

Team Awards

First-place team: $1,500 (The team will also be sponsored to participate in a national analytics competition.)

Second-place team: $1,000

Third-place team: $500

Skills Requirements

Business Understanding – Understanding the problems and opportunities that drive the analysis. This is typically an issue that the sponsor wants to understand using analytics.

Data Understanding – Understanding the data that is to be analyzed. This includes defining each of the variables in the analysis process.

Data Preparation – Cleaning up any issues in the data to allow it to be analyzed using various software tools.

Data Modeling – Analyzing the cleaned data using supervised and unsupervised modeling to discover useful insights from the data that can help address the sponsors’ problems and opportunities.

Evaluation – Comparing the results found in the modeling phase to the original issues provided by the sponsor to see if the issues have been addressed. This phase also looks at recommendations for future projects.

Presentation – Delivering a strong presentation to the Hanes executive team.

Passion for learning and problem solving plus some Excel skills qualifies any student to take part in the challenge. We recommend students team up with others with complimentary skillsets for a successful challenge experience.

Role of Faculty Mentor

A faculty member may serve as advisor to student teams, with the understanding that the primary work is done by the students. Mentors should not be involved in setting the direction of the analysis or in the analysis itself.

Team Guidelines

All teams must consist of three members who represent different quantitative disciplines on campus. At least two members must be majoring in disciplines in different schools (i.e. statistics and media analytics). If you want to participate but don’t have a team, email Dr. Mesgari with your information, including your majors and minors and analytics-related courses and internships, and we will team you up with other students.

Teams must identify at least one faculty mentor to work with. Teams need to run their ideas by their mentor, as well as present their analytics model to their mentor for approval before presenting it to the Hanes executive team. If you need help finding a mentor, email Dr. Mesgari and he will match you with a mentor.

All submitted team applications will go through a review process for approval.

Application Guidelines

  • Team members’ names and disciplines (3 members)
  • Analytics experience (including internships and courses) of each of the team members
  • Team members’ skills mapped to the competition skills requirements
  • Success strategy the team plans to pursue when working on the case competition
  • Team strengths and weaknesses (2 of each)
  • Faculty mentor’s name and title

About HanesBrands

HanesBrands is a socially responsible manufacturer and marketer of leading everyday basic apparel under some of the world’s strongest apparel brands in the Americas, Europe and Asia, as well as in Australia and South Africa. HanesBrands employs 65,300 people worldwide and its sales revenue reached 5.7 billion in 2016.

Challenge Co-Chairs