Joseph Onyemakonor ’24
MS in Business Analytics
After earning his bachelor’s from Caritas University in Nigeria, Joseph Onyemakonor hit the ground running. He landed a job in financial planning and analysis, and also co-founded Burette Nigeria Limited, a service firm focused on fleet management, agriculture and engineering. But he wanted to up his game, which led him to LeBow’s Master’s in Business Analytics program.
“I wanted to deepen my technical expertise in data analytics and business intelligence,” he says. “The blend of analytics, business strategy, and hands-on learning was exactly what I needed to advance my career.”
He turned to the master’s program to help augment his industry experience with academic insights and best practices. “It can be easy to figure things out by yourself, but I wanted to get the best-in-class information, to learn from the experts the best way to do things,” he says.
The LeBow program met that mark, with the final project proving especially impactful. Joseph worked with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to build a model for understanding the factors that influence car-crash severity.
“The project combined everything we’d learned: It involved processing the data, and working with the stakeholders to really understand the problem,” he says. That information then helped to inform models that could help officials to better understand and manage traffic accidents.
Today, he’s putting those same tools to work as a senior manager of financial planning and analysis at Walmart. That hands-on project, he says, “reinforced my ability to translate complex data into strategic insights — something I apply daily in my role."
Working within the retail giant’s supply-chain operation, he supports transportation, finance and distribution center costs, focusing on financial strategy, automation and reporting optimization.
In practical terms, he says, every day he’s asking, “How do you take an unstructured, ambiguous question and turn it into an answer that makes sense to the business?”
He’s very focused right now on forecasting accuracy — ensuring business projections are valid. “That’s a very big deal for company the size of Walmart,” he says. “There are millions and millions of records. How do you simplify it in a way that you can make a projection of what the next three, six or twelve months are going to look like?”
Finding the right answer requires an intimate understanding of analytical tools and technologies, and he’s also drawing on that knowledge in a side project: building an AI-powered analytics platform.
The problem to be solved: AI can interact with web sites, pretending to be human and potentially skewing data for marketers. An AI-powered solution could offer “a way to distinguish between who’s the human on their website and who’s a bot,” he says.
“This project has allowed me to apply so many of the skills I gained during the MS in Business Analytics program — particularly in data analytics, machine learning and automation.”