Revenue Analytics announced the winners of the 9^th Annual Revenue Analytics Revenue Optimization Challenge at The Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

The Revenue Optimization Challenge was issued to MBA students in Professor Laurie Garrow’s Pricing Analytics and Revenue Management classes at Georgia Tech’s College of Management. Professor Garrow and Robert G. Cross, Revenue Analytics’ Chairman & CEO and author of The New York Times Business Best Seller, Revenue Management, were the judges of the Revenue Optimization Challenge.

The Challenge is designed to promote excellence in the creative use of Pricing and Revenue Management techniques to solve complex business problems and increase revenue and profits. The judging criteria include originality of ideas, financial impact, benefits to consumers and applicability of the principles to others.

The first winning entry was submitted by Kent Czechowski. He proposed an innovative application of Revenue Management techniques for pricing Supercomputer access for the world’s most powerful computers. Using historic data from a Supercomputer provider, Czechowski analyzed over 37,000 jobs exploring opportunities to segment by number of nodes used, duration and submission time. He imputed customers’ willingness-to-pay from the submission characteristics. Simulations demonstrated that targeting price increases based upon the characteristics of the job submission could increase revenue by over 10%. As demands for business intelligence from Big Data increases exponentially and cloud service offerings expand, this winning entry demonstrates that Revenue Management techniques can help change the paradigm for cloud access, allowing customers access times and price points that meet their specific needs.

The second winning team of MBA students included Yevgeniy Khislavskiy, Dusty Schaffner, and Maximino Aybar. They formulated an approach to applying advanced Revenue Management techniques to enable the introduction of a Bike Share program in the Atlanta Beltline. Leveraging detailed bike path data available from a similar bike trail in Arlington VA, they analyzed commuter and recreational patterns. Using Revenue Management concepts applied to simulation and optimization techniques, they proved that a Bike Share program could be financially viable and essentially self-funding. Many urban areas are expanding the use of bike lanes and trails and are actively encouraging the use of bicycles to reduce congestion and increase health. This winning team employed Revenue Management techniques to leverage existing infrastructure, including tie-ins to public transportation, to make biking a practical and self-funding initiative for urban commuters.

“This was a very competitive group of entries,” remarked Revenue Analytics’ Robert Cross, sponsor of the Challenge. “It was rewarding to see the teams take the core concepts of Revenue Management from the classroom and apply them successfully in a wide variety of applications. The Revenue Analytics Revenue Optimization Challenge winners had ingenious and rigorous approaches to showing how advanced analytics can help any entity understand customer demand and boost revenue from optimizing the price and availability of products.”

About Revenue Analytics

Revenue Analytics is the world’s leading consulting firm in designing visionary capabilities in Pricing and Revenue Management. Revenue Analytics partners with clients to create elegant solutions that deliver high impact results. The firm’s principals have successfully facilitated more than 100 previous clients uncovering over $10 billion in additional revenues. For more information, visit www.revenueanalytics.com.