HOW TO USE THE POWER OF DATA TO SUPERCHARGE YOUR BUSINESS

DATA-DRIVEN SOFTWARE HOLDS THE KEY TO TRANSFORMING AND OPTIMIZING INDUSTRIAL OPERATIONS, WRITES RÓNÁN DE HOOGE, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF INFORMATION, AVEVA

In the last two years, businesses around the world have had to act quickly and nimbly. As companies reached out to serve customers and optimise performance in new ways, shared data networks revealed themselves as the dynamic engines of corporate performance.

Accurate, timely data – and the ability to organise and analyze it – has never been more important to reshaping how your company operates.

During the pandemic, transforming data insights into guidance for higher operational performance was revealed to be critical for success. In a recent whitepaper from Harvard Business

Review Analytics Services (HBRAS) commissioned by AVEVA, ‘The Data Dividend: Achieving Performance Intelligence with data-driven industrial software’, the authors highlight how the pandemic exposed gaps in supply chains – sharpening the drive to use data to achieve new business heights

According to Gartner, companies that effectively share data throughout their ecosystem will achieve 50% higher growth than those with a siloed approach. The pandemic was a reallife test bed for these theories: the last two years has proven the benefits of company-wide leveraged data intelligence.

Industries are transforming

It’s no secret that data-led innovation is transforming how workers perform critical tasks. Whereas they once focused on tedious operational tasks, workers are now tapping data to simulate and visualise opportunities, reinvent strategies with agility, and collaborate more effectively.

Digital-first models are rapidly becoming standard operational benchmarks. Industries are finally beginning to realise the promises of digital transformation as they unlock higher performance through collaboration between connected businesses and individuals.

Unlocking new capacity

The data-sharing revolution is important because it unlocks new ways of working. It is called “performance intelligence”:

the capacity to harness data-led insights, enabling people to maximise sustainable value across assets, processes, locations, and organisations.

Organisations that want to position themselves for success in uncertain times need the help of robust software and the ability to combine it with data analytics to better engineer processes, optimise operations, and maximise performance.

Performance intelligence is based on utilising a state-of-the-art software portfolio that connects the power of AI, which is rooted in real-time and historical data, with human intelligence to drive strategic insights. Embracing a dataled approach drives profitability and sustainability in equal measure because you can more efficiently optimise engineering and operations, and the materials, energy and processes that they encompass.

A fitting example is US power leader Dominion Energy, a leader in renewable power. The team there gathers and shares data from across its North American grid network using performance intelligence solutions. While the primary driver for unifying the data was initially to manage renewables intermittency and ensure efficient operations, the cloud-based approach has allowed Dominion’s team to turn power grid data into a new source of revenue.

Dominion’s energy source and performance data lets Dominion’s customers track their power sources individually, and provides a data-trail that proves each company is using energy from low-carbon sources. This, in turn, enables Dominion’s customers to provide proof of their own netzero commitments to investors and environmental, social and governance auditors. As a result, Dominion is now able to share the data at a price with customers, who see huge value in receiving real-time updates that can validate their own net-zero performance. For Dominion, this new source of revenue is also helping to accelerate the low carbon energy transition in North America.

The HBRAS report discusses how information sharing of this kind is helping industrial companies use data to reimagine how they approach production, allowing them to set new goals when it comes to efficiency, productivity, sustainability, and employee well-being.

The study also shows how leaders are freed up to think and act boldly – using advanced industrial software to predict the next big opportunity.

Creating an enterprise-wide view

Today’s industrial software systems are often comprised of individual applications that frequently function in isolation. There’s limited interaction from one stage to the next when it comes to the software tools used among research and development, manufacturing, quality control, and design.

This deficiency is important because what manufacturers are looking for is integration, analysis, and contextualisation across the whole company—an end-toend system that would lead to an enterprise-wide view.

An integrated strategy that connects all the industrial pillars helps create an enterprise-wide view and realises new and transformative corporate capabilities. Having such a view, for example, could inform a company about how an issue with maintenance can impact business. Such data can also help a company successfully accomplish its strategic goals, including sustainability targets.

Achieving performance intelligence

For a factory to deliver optimal results and meet strategic corporate goals, people who work there need access to industrial data analytics as it flows across processes, assets, locations, and the whole organisation. Such a smart factory also needs to be part of a modern supply chain that is an integrated, connected, end-toend network that’s “always on.” To make that happen, the data-driven information needs to flow throughout all parts of the operations and supply chain, including the factory floor.

Achieving this data-driven performance means you need systemspecific industrial software that is driven by real-time and historical information, integrated with other applications, and powered by AI and ultimately directed by human insight.

As the HBRAS paper shows, industrial leaders from pharmaceuticals and manufacturing to energy and infrastructure are using data-sharing models to create these new operating paradigms, and unlock higher levels of success.

The benefits of data-centric thinking radiate beyond operations and reshape how the wider organisation collaborates and grows. This is performance intelligence in action, expanding the limits of what industries can achieve, unlocking new ways to drive sustainable competitive advantage.

There’s never been a more exciting time to be at the forefront of the next industrial revolution.