The Application of Business Intelligence and Analytics in Understanding and Improving the Event Organisation: A Case Study of Operational Research Society Conferences

Business Intelligence and Analytics (BIA) has become significant in any business, organisations as they utilise the collected data to identify customers' demands, preferences and potential needs. This research is carried out to understand how BIA could help improving the events organisations in the large international academic society like Operational Research Society (ORS). Several papers focusing on BIA and its applications applied in various areas have been reviewed, however there is still a lack of research in what approaches and techniques of BIA could help business events to benefit from their historical data. Obtaining the multi-variable data sets from ORS for five OR annual conferences, the task is to apply appropriate BIA techniques to have an insight understanding of the overall performance and give some recommendations. After the data preparation and data analysis, we present an Artificial neural network (ANN) model to predict the booking days by using the profile of the delegate as the input. Three trials of different number of hidden layers and neurons were conducted under both label encoding and one-hot encoding to compare the accuracy. Recommendations to the conference planners are listed based on the results