La chambre de commerce et d’industrie (CCI) de Versailles

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In France, the role of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (CCI) is to protect the interests of companies and promote regional economic development. “It’s all about maintaining and developing economic activity,” says Jérôme Boué, manager of economic research in the Research and Forecasting Department of the Versailles Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which covers two French departments (Yvelines and Val d’Oise) that are home to around 75,000 companies.

One team, two missions

The seven-member Research function is tasked with improving understanding of what is actually going on in the region and identifying those areas of economic activity that deserve specific support initiatives. “For example, the CCI may become involved in encouraging networking between companies in a given industry sector,” Boué explains.

Its second mission involves forecasting – a role new for CCIs: “It’s not enough simply to know what’s going on in terms of economic activity; we also need to understand how things may develop in the future fusing predictive scenarios,” he continues.

Data by the million

The Versailles CCI introduced its research structure at the beginning of the 2000s: “Our obligation to understand our region better demanded the purchase of a software solution (IBM® SPSS® Statistics) to analyze our existing databases, which included the business registry and the Unedic (the French National Professional Union for Employment in Industry and Trade) database.” It was clear that this strategically important historical data could not be managed effectively using a spreadsheet program, since the total amount of data ran to more than one million rows and dozens of columns.

“The volume was much too great, and the key benefit of IBM SPSS Statistics is its power and ability to manage large volumes of data, especially given our need to divide up the region into sub-regions, group communities together, and analyze particular areas of the economy to make our analyses more relevant,” Boué explains.

However, there was no need to use extremely advanced statistical functions: “We produce four- and five-dimensional OLAP cubes, and IBM SPSS Statistics proved to be the most practical and easy-to-use solution, since users don’t need in-depth or detailed training,” he continues.

Scenarios tested, assumptions simulated

The need for statistical analyses goes beyond the CCI’s internal needs: “We also work on behalf of local authorities to conduct diagnostic economic analyses and, for major companies, to measure issues such as the economic impact of their local presence,” Boué adds. But the CCI also has a need for predictive analytics and, once again, IBM SPSS solutions have proved invaluable: “When you need to produce a diagnostic analysis and predict how it might evolve, it’s important that you can test alternative scenarios and simulate the effect of multiple assumptions,” he concludes.

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