Still smiling from the successful EDA you just obtained, you follow Andy, the colleague who helped you with it, and walk into the office of your boss, Mr. Sheen: Have you finally discovered where all this mess is coming from? Not exactly what you would call a warm welcome, I agree.
Nevertheless, your colleague seems to be quite used to these kinds of high-pressure situations and quietly starts to expose all the analyses you have performed, from the summary statistics to the graphical EDA. Your boss is some kind of hybrid profile and Andy knows that: exposing your work with a sufficient level of detail will help your boss understand that, despite the great hurry the work was done in, it was done in the most accurate way possible.
Andy finally comes to the point—the cash flow recorded within the last quarter is coming from the Middle East area.
"The Middle East? We have not been there for a long time. Nevertheless, I personally know Marc, the Chief Operating Officer for that region, we can easily take our analyses further: I will personally call him today."
I would not be that hasty. You just heard the heavy voice of Mr. Clough, internal audit head for the east area. I personally know Marc Leveque as well. This is such a strange case that we should exclude any hypothesis too early. Immediately contacting Mr. Leveque would place him in a status of alert, and we do not want that. I have got another idea: give me a list of companies related to this drop and I will put some of my guys on them to see if they can highlight anything suspicious. And we have to do it quickly, we need it by tomorrow.
At the moment, we do not have this kind of data. You know our data mining engine is still not working and we cannot tell you from her who is not paying in the Middle East. Mr. Sheen is not going to let it go too easily.
Mr. Sheen is right, the best we can do by tomorrow is try to understand which companies are historically most prone to default and give you a list of the companies having the same features today in the Middle East.
We can do what Andy is saying, but he was wrong about time: we need two days.
The later we start, the later we fix it. OK, we can arrange for these two days. Thank you for your cooperation as usual. Mr. Sheen, let me know when the results come out. Have a nice day.
Even if the discussion was not pleasant, the final output is clear: we need to find out which kinds of companies are historically most prone to default and develop a list of the companies with the same features today within the Middle East area.
Andy, please take care of this for me, it was your idea. And you can work with Andy on this as well, [your name here]. Nice, you will work with Andy on this. I will leave you alone for this chapter, as I did for the previous one. Let us see in the Summary section!