Saving millions with a Shiny app
Tanya Cashorali
Episode notes
We were joined by Tanya Cashorali, CEO & Founder at TCB Analytics. Tanya is passionate about playing with data but using it for good causes whenever possible. Energized by working with ambitious people on difficult problems. I’m a huge advocate of rapid prototyping data products using Shiny and can talk about it for hours!
What was your biggest win for a client? (23:30)
We’ve had a lot of wins moving someone from Excel into a reproducible R pipeline and then displaying all the results in Shiny.
One example is a pharma company that was analyzing clinical trial data super manually, generating reports in Excel and putting together a PowerPoint weekly.
It probably took about 20 hours of multiple people’s time.
We made a Shiny app and that turned this into pretty much no time at all. They sent us the data and it was updated monthly.
They were able to then take that Shiny app to senior management and clinical trial managers to make decisions based on data very quickly, helping them understand which clinical trial sites were having problems.
Another similar one at another pharma company was focused on drug manufacturing, where there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
When there’s a contaminant in a batch, it can basically cause millions and millions of dollars in company loss because they have to shut down manufacturing completely until they identify the problem.
This involves going up and downstream of these different drug products to identify the issues. It was taking a team of 5-10 people sometimes 6 months to identify the problem. Meaning for 6 months, you’re not able to manufacture drugs.
We built a Shiny app that built out a D3 directed graph. This enabled one person to go and type in the drug compound and see everything up and downstream. It took that one person now maybe a week or several days to identify the problem now.
That’s an instance where you could say this is literally millions of savings from a Shiny app.
To me that just shows the power of R and the ability to really streamline manual processes.
Featured in this episode
I love connecting people across the data science community to share what they're accomplishing with data and help others do the same through community discussions, industry meetups, and more.
Passionate about playing with data but using it for good causes whenever possible. Energized by working with ambitious people on difficult problems.
