A weekend in April, 50 Stratiteq hackers gathered at Malmö Studio to take on this year’s client challenges in our annual event Stratiteq Hack. This year we were also joined by hackers from some of our sister companies in Aricoma Digital – a great way to co-create and get to know each other more.
Stratiteq Hack is a hackathon where developers, solution architects, data scientists, UX designers, and others involved in software development collaborate intensively on innovative software solutions. The goal of Stratiteq Hack is to create an innovative data-driven software solutions for defined business challenges, and in the end – to create real business impact for our clients. This year’s business challenges were provided by Lekolar, Folktandvården Skåne, Careium and Fremia.
Scheduling – a major challenge
Three of the cases actually had a common denominator in scheduling, whether of customer service, dentists or operators. Schedules are challenging in many ways – ensuring the right knowledge to offer the best customer service, ensuring the best availability both from a cost efficiency perspective as well as client experience and not the least to make the work with producing the schedules more efficient to both save time, money and provide the best employee experience. We were challenged on all three aspects by our various cases and the solutions included both AI and machine learning components to optimize scheduling (especially long-term scheduling), scheduling user interface solutions in Dynamics 365 and Power Apps as well as webb applications for patients and employees to schedule either appointments or availability to work.
“We saw our participation in the hack as an exciting challenge. We have always analyzed our data to deliver efficient service that meets our own targets, as well as requirements from customers and society in terms of deadlines, quality and regulations. Stratiteq Hack gave us a great opportunity to see if computers could see patterns in our data that the human eye has a hard time detecting. For us, the entire process was very educational and fun. We received questions which were both unexpected and thought-provoking, but above all it was impressing to see the commitment from everyone involved. Also the final results were exciting, especially as the different hack-teams had attacked the problem from different points of view. This lead to interesting discussions and thoughts for the future” says Martin Puumalainen, Country Director Careium Sweden.
Cost control in logistics
Our fourth use case involved logistics and the ability to automate invoice control to reduce manual work and improve cost control. An additional solution idea was also identified to enable the client to optimize the delivery choices to both save cost but not the least carbon dioxide and hence increase sustainability.
Hackathons – innovation that visualizes business value
As usual I’m stunned by the amount of creativity and prototypes which can be created in a very short time frame when you combine clever people with different skillsets. Our developer Adeyemi Adedokun participated in the hack for the first time this year and says the following about his experience: “What I found most incredible about the Stratiteq Hack was the amount of actual work we (all the teams) were able to get done within such a short amount of time. The work environment was not business as usual. There was constant supply of food, candies, snacks, drinks, etc. and frequent game breaks which kept our energy at a high level all through the event. I noticed the expressions from our client representatives as we presented insights and further questions derived from their dataset on the second day of the event. They were amazed by how far we had come in such little time, and they sure couldn’t wait to see the solutions we would proffer”.
Mixing data engineers, data scientists, developers, designers and business people enables us to inspire and show our clients what potential lies in their data and the business value that can be created when combined with external data and technical solutions. It has proven to be one of the best ways to help our clients start or continue the data-driven discussion internally and we look forward to continue helping them take the next step on the journey to become data-driven businesses.
We would like to thank our participating companies for their trust and engagement in the hackathon as well give our talented hackers a huge round of applause for their commitment and dedication to the Stratiteq Hack 2022. We are already looking forward to next year’s event!
