Meet Point B’er Chris Lau
Get to know Chris, a data and analytics consultant based in our Phoenix location.
Meet Chris Lau, a Managing Consultant who has been with Point B for 5 years. When he’s not designing and building data platforms for clients, you can find him exploring the world of food, whether through his favorite podcasts like Good Food or whipping up a new recipe from his cookbook collection. As a dedicated foodie, his dream superpower is teleportation – just so he can grab dinner in New York and be back in his bed at the end of the night. Cooking is a weekend ritual, complete with cooking new recipes from his cookbook collection, as well as trying out a new restaurant every week with his wife and son. He’s a fan of food-related shows like The Next Thing You Eat and Lost Kitchen, as well as spending time with family.
Describe the work you do and what makes you proud to work at Point B?
I design and build analytic platforms for organizations to enable consistent, trustworthy insights critical to their strategic growth and operational excellence.
What makes you proud to work at Point B?
I appreciate how we show up for customers and what we bring to the table. There are a lot of firms out there that sell the next shiny tech object, but we're really focused on building technology solutions that drives business outcomes and produce tangible business value. That's the organizing principle behind how we approach our projects.
It makes me proud how we're able to build relationships and move the needle for our customers in a way that I feel is both unique in the tech space and sustainable for them long-term. Many other firms offerings deliver an outcome that meets a short-term appetite, but does not result in a sustainable, scalable solution that aligns withan organization’s long-term goals or vision.
One of our core values is “own it.” How did you take ownership of a project or problem that led to a positive outcome for a customer?
I worked with a team at a leading global food and beverage company that facilitated donations from the company’s stores to local food banks and agencies. They asked us to build a dashboard to show their impact with metrics and KPIs. In diving into the work, we found that their data curation process was unsustainable and prone to human errors and inconsistencies.
Rather than just temporarily fixing their current curation process, we proposed going beyond and building an automated process to integrate their internal data and data from their external donation partners. We built the solution in the company’s existing data ecosystem (to ensure it was well-aligned to existing support structures) that integrated data from those various sources in an automated fashion to create intuitive, ready-to-consume datasets to serve a wide array of audiences.
It’s a memorable project because of the broader social impact and sustainability mission. It was a privilege to be able to design and build a product that furthered that mission and highlighted its importance and quantitative impact of it. It was also satisfying to see how individuals’ bandwidth was reallocated from removing manual data wrangling efforts to growing the impact and operational excellence of the food donation programs.
I also enjoyed moving the needle for the business for a broader impact – we also identified that the way the company was receiving data was being underreported, so the company was missing out on potential tax benefits with the inaccurate reporting of the donation data.
One of our core values is “Win through Innovation and Growth.” How have you used technology or innovation to drive success for yourself, our customers, and/or the team at Point B?
How we show up with the right technology for customers on projects. Enabling people to be able to effectively use technology is as important as the technology itself. Thinking about my work with the global food and beverage company, we were able to free up individuals to focus on their core job and to have insights and the data they need to improve performance and engagement within their program. Being able to help others easily paint the story of value they’re bringing to the table is just one of the ways we show up for our customers and help them innovate to win and grow.
Describe Point B’s culture in 1 word. Why that word?
Collegial. There’s a consistent experience of helpfulness that is a part of the fabric of our culture.
How is Point B helping you grow your career?
The work we do is really interesting, and it pushes me to grow. I also have a lot of support from my director for my development. For example, he allocated time for me to work on some Microsoft certifications that were important for me and Point B. I’m also provided opportunities to grow through the type of work I do for customers.
