Dr. Michael O’Connell,
Chief Analytics Officer
Tibco

Dr. O’Connell opened the second day of the Summit with a presentation on using data in real-time to assist in decision-making.

“We believe that if you can compress the time between the business event, getting the data ready for the analysis, completing an analysis and taking an action, that this vastly increases the business value.”

Dr. O’Connell used examples from the world of Formula 1 racing, where data is fed constantly from the cars, and needs to be analysed and interpreted in order to inform race strategy decisions.

TIBCO, he said, is bring its data science, visual analysis and real-time streaming to bear on all the data as it arrives: he calls it “hyper-converged analytics.”

The same speed of analysis is critical to all levels of operations in the energy sector: from oil and gas exploration, where TIBCO software enables modelling the structure of reservoirs, to drilling, where analytics can constantly monitor the state of the drill bit and the composition of the surrounding rock, to production, where software can monitor and analyse the output of multiple producing wells.

The potential of TIBCO’s real-time analysis products extends to refinery operations, logistics and retail as well, and on into trading, Dr. O’Connell said.

Taking 2020 as an example, he demonstrated how a slowdown in Chinese energy imports together with increasing oil in floating storage generated opportunities captured by TIBCO software. With access to multiple trading environments, including dark pools, as well as AI-enabled analysis of news feeds, TIBCO is able to generate actionable analysis.

“The worlds of analytics, data science, data management, and operations are colliding and converging.”

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Simon Hardy,
Head of Supply Chain Commercial Strategy
ICIS

Simon Hardy’s presentation focused on digitalizing supply chain management. He described the chemical industry’s early steps into digital technology to manage the flow of products.

These early efforts focused on streamlining individual bilateral supply chain relationships, connecting the supplier to shippers, importers, warehouses to the consumer, but not leveraging this data to connect to the full ecosystem.

More recently, these data systems are being leveraged to provide wider access to third-party products, for example. “Supply chain operating networks [have] started to morph into digital supply networks and are starting to provide other elements as well,” Hardy said.

More data is being leveraged to smooth the passage of products, he added. Identifying shipping bottlenecks and re-directing orders to by-pass those problems is one example.

These systems are now benefiting from being “always on”, Hardy said. “Constantly, accessible, always on, is a critical part of how chemical companies are looking at their customer base.”

But this is still a digital model: how does the industry move to digitized?

Historically, data has tended to be backward-looking, recording previous events and developments. The challenge, he said, is to start looking forward, moving from “descriptive” to “prescriptive”.

This requires systems and people to plan for small, unseen risks and events, the “day-to-day” risks rather than the “big picture” challenges.

This, Hardy said, requires “emotional intelligence” to dampen the force of these small shocks, and to respond accordingly. Simply following analytics will not work. Human intervention and judgement is needed to smooth the potential shock of a missed delivery and to deliver a solution.

In a more agile and fast-responding world, clients will be demanding that their mission critical raw material supplies are guaranteed, nearby, and they will want to know the status of that supply, Hardy explained.

Suppliers, on the other hand, are also going to want to be more rightly integrated into their clients’ operations. They will want to have insight into production forecasts, for example, which will help them reduce supply chain friction.

As an example, Hardy suggested that a more prescriptive approach to Rhine barge deliveries would take into account seasonal water level changes, and plan ahead for alternative forms of delivery. By tapping into relevant weather or other data over longer periods, prescriptive models of likely river conditions can be built up and help supply chain managers to smooth over any interruptions.

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This is a ZE Global Tech Summit Recap Blog.

Kent Graziano,
Chief Technical Evangelist,
Snowflake

Kent Graziano’s presentation dealt with the emergence of the “data cloud”, the system in which data is held remotely but at the same time, easily accessible to organizations and individuals.

The data cloud “removes the need for data pipelines and copying data, and resolves differences, even between the security protocols across the different clouds; this really is going to simplify data sharing for everyone.”

The proliferation of data has led to datasets being held in different “silos”, either in physical storage or in the cloud. “Warehousing” data in these silos can prevent organizations from becoming properly data-driven.

At the same time, the emergence of a separate “application” cloud means that data and the applications that process it are often separated, and different departments do not always see the same datasets.

The “data cloud” is in essence a new cloud that seamlessly complements both of these clouds and creates frictionless, but still governed, access to data.

Graziano presented Snowflake’s platform that is “built for the cloud architecture, enabling organizations to work on common data for a wide range of workloads with the performance scale needed to support their business analytic needs.”

Users can share their datasets with any other user, either internally within an organization or externally, through a data marketplace, while always retaining control over the data, he said.

Snowflake’s data cloud is underpinning cooperative efforts to learn more about the Covid-19 pandemic: it’s helping companies plan their operations amid local restrictions, and governments are using it to monitor the effect of Covid-19 and respond to local spikes in case numbers.

“Organizations that embrace the data cloud [will] be rewarded with opportunities and find new ways to enhance customer and stakeholder value, develop a lasting partnership with their peers, [overcome] the toughest business challenges and really become data leaders,” Graziano said.

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