Success in the modern energy and commodity industry requires companies to adopt a proactive, data-driven approach. The COVID-19 pandemic created an environment of volatility in commodity markets, pushing companies to transform their energy supply chain into a strategic value chain through cost efficiency and enhanced processes. Many companies have adopted data automation and analytics tools to gain a competitive edge.

Here are the top 10+ things energy and commodity businesses should know about data automation in order to get ahead of the competition.   

1. It Provides Cost Savings

Automating your data and digital processes can help unlock 40% to 75% in cost savings. You may think of 15-20% direct cost saving as a reasonable median estimate (assuming a client starts from little automation, lots of silos, etc.).

2. It Boosts Efficiency

Data automation gives a clear view of cost and ownership and helps devise plans to maximize efficiency in the following areas.

• Data collection
• Infra stuff (Software and hardware for data management)
• Governance (time spend defining, categorizing data (“ontology”), deciding which quality control fits what usage, and prioritizing reports)
• Cost of using data

3. It Ensures Regulatory Compliance

Data automation strengthens security, drives compliance, reduces risk, and helps companies stay on top of regulatory requirements. Ultimately, this frees up a lot of time, which businesses can invest in more critical matters.

4. It Delivers Relevant Data

Companies can break down data silos and yield relevant, contextualized data with data automation. This helps streamline business processes and saves time.

5. It Empowers Decision-Making

Data automation empowers decision-making across the business. Companies can convert data into actionable knowledge to make profitable decisions and achieve short and long-term goals.  

6. It Helps Track Data Usage

Data automation tools help track data usage to manage and optimize licenses subscriptions. Companies can save millions of dollars this way.

7. It Promotes Process Accuracy

Intelligent automation tools allow companies to simplify and improve the accuracy of their processes, including Independent Price Verification and Mark-to-Market Trader Marks.

8. It Improves Data Synchronization

Data automation tools distinguish sources (where you can pull data from) and destinations (where you can push data). They enable you to determine a push and pull integration that fits your workflow.

9. It Adds to Your Business’s Resilience and Optionality

Alongside cost savings, data automation helps integrate resilience and optionality in various business areas. It improves your ability to identify vulnerabilities, such as a plant located in an unstable country and routes going through extreme weather, as well as your aptness to generate options to optimize maintenance and discover how much faster you can run some equipment.

The more data-driven a company is, the bolder the decisions it’ll make to scale the business.

10. It Supports Ambitious and Unique Transformation Plans

Data automation tools play an integral role in the success of ambitious transformation plans like decarbonization. These tools make it easy for businesses to implement tasks, assess early momentum, and track their progress and benefits.

11. It Ensures Data Security

Automation tools can help protect and provide immediate complete backup for enterprise data. This proves helpful when a company gets hacked.

Achieve Data Automation and Business Operations Excellence with ZEMA

ZEMA is an award-winning data management, integration, and analytics platform. It provides industry-best end-to-end management solutions and ensures 100% transparency and risk mitigation. We also have an award-winning ZE Cloud solution for Data Management in the Cloud.

Companies in the energy and commodity markets may anticipate likely resistance to the notion that the nuances of one’s job can be codified. However, with the proper involvement of experts and control consultants and ZEMA integration in existing processes, remarkable efficiency and cost savings can be achieved.  

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Timely decision-making for businesses operating in data-intensive industries requires investing in creating viable support systems to help them make well-informed and impactful decisions. Businesses operating in industries like energy, commodities, agriculture, shipping, mining, insurance, finance, renewable energy, oil and gas, and utilities require data support systems that offer high-quality and timely data, which can directly influence your decision-making process as they directly impact the outcome of business operations.

Establishing the appropriate infrastructure for an in-house data management system that provides you with a steady and organized stream of critical data presents several challenges. The advent of managed data services comes with several possible advantages that can help you overcome the obstacles your organization might face in creating such data systems.

This post will discuss the advantages of outsourcing data management services for your organization. We will first introduce you to the challenges of data management that can become obstacles for your organization and the fundamentals of holistic data management solutions.

A better grasp of these aspects will help you understand how ZEMA’s managed data services can help your organization unlock its full potential and drive its growth into a more successful future.

The Primary Challenges For Data Management

The manner in which your organization captures, stores, distributes, and analyzes data, presents the most significant challenges for your organization. Let’s take a quick look at the five challenges your organization should address:

• Data Automation:

Your organization can acquire critical data through various sources, including internally within the company and through external data vendors. It creates multi-faceted datasets, and each data stream supplies its own set of standards. Efficiently handling enormous amounts of data with different standards has become a significant challenge. Adequate data automation measures can minimize the lag and resources spent on acquiring, organizing, and utilizing crucial data.

• Volume:

And IDC study showed that 2011 saw 1.8 trillion gigabytes of data being produced – a figure expected to grow by 50 times by year-end 2021. The sheer volume of data being produced and accumulated requires extensive monitoring and validation, necessitating intelligent data management systems that can make order out of chaos. Provided that your organization has access to a data management system capable of processing significant volumes of data, you can have access to more intelligence, giving your organization a competitive edge.

• Inconsistencies:

Working with data vendors comes with several challenges, including inconsistencies. Data vendors are also working to evolve and improve different aspects of their businesses, requiring the need to change their data formats or periodic downtimes to enact those changes. Short notice announcements regarding format changes or no announcements can present challenges for your business.

Additionally, data vendors may revise the data they accumulate if they determine that initial values are not accurate. Rechecking the data sources from your vendor to keep track of revisions repeatedly can result in the data vendor flagging your organization and eliminating a valuable data stream. Working with an experienced managed data services provider can help you circumvent this obstacle.

• Data Analysis:

Analyzing and using data obtained from vendors that may be inconsistent or inaccurate altogether can prove to be devastating for your organization. Spending enormous resources on over-analyzing inaccurate data could hamper your company’s decision-making systems, especially if the experts you are working with cannot identify any abnormalities.

Intelligent data management systems that can navigate complex data and create meaningful analyses can mitigate the time- and labor-intensive process of removing inaccuracies and help you maximize the benefits of accurate and clean data streams.

• Integration:

The final goal for organizations using data management systems is to accumulate multi-faceted datasets and integrate them into business intelligence tools, trade and risk applications, custom applications, and other operational aspects. The data collected by your organization must meet your internal systems requirements for successful and effective integration into your business processes.

The right data management solution should ideally provide you with a wide range of integration points so you can use the necessary technology to make sense of all the data for meaningful and timely decisions.

Understanding The Fundamentals Of Holistic Data Management Solutions

Effective and intelligent data management systems can address these challenges. Remember that a data management system does more than merely capture data. It is responsible for organizing and analyzing multi-faceted datasets to allow your organization to use the data for timely and effective decision-making.

The fundamentals of holistic data management solutions include entire workflows for:

• Data Capture: A complete data management system captures data in real-time, all the time, considering the data volume as a crucial factor.
• Data Validation: It should validate the sheer volume of data to check whether it is complete and accurate.
• Administration: It should provide entitlement management to grant, resolve, enforce, revoke and administer fine-grained access entitlements of data while organizing it.
• Viewing Data: It should provide user-friendly but powerful ways to effectively view data, presenting it in a configurable visual format based on necessity.
• Third-Party Analytical Tools: It should work with third-party analytical tools to further validate the data.
• Process Automation: It should automate data processing to reduce resource-intensive business processes, ensure greater accuracy and security, and be more transparent for easier auditing and accountability.
• Data Distribution: It should provide multiple integration points and offer adequate measures to move data around the organization for more effective use of data.

The Benefits Of Outsourcing Data Management Services

Understanding the challenges of data management for organizations and the fundamentals that can create an effective and complete data management solution might already present you with a clearer picture of the advantages of outsourcing data management services.

Gartner predicts that 90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical asset for organizations, and analytics will become an essential competency for them.

The right managed data services that can accumulate, organize, analyze, process, effectively distribute, and integrate enormous volumes of multi-faceted datasets presents you with several advantages, including:

1. Scaling Up Your Organization

Eliminating the resource- and labor-intensive aspects of data management through an effective managed data service solution can free up enough resources to rapidly expand output and scale up your organization.

Transparent fee structures with data management solution providers help you better track your organizational expenses for data management and control those costs. No longer having to worry about unforeseen expenditure in that regard can free up your team to focus on garnering in-house talent and resources to grow your organization.

2. Improved Data Security

Several industries, including energy, commodities, agriculture, shipping, mining, insurance, finance, renewable energy, oil and gas, and utilities, require high standards to comply with the storage and sharing of sensitive data. Not fulfilling these compliance standards can result in exorbitant fines.

Failing to meet the compliance standards also exposes your organization to the threat of data attacks. According to a 2021 report from IBM and the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach can be as high as $4.24 million. Outsourcing data management to experts who can understand how to identify and implement the necessary data security can help you avoid these challenges.

3. Meet The Latest Tax Requirements

Compliance extends beyond meeting data security standards. Your organization must also meet the most updated tax regulations. Avoiding tax penalties and finding new tax incentives is another advantage of outsourcing data management services.

4. Making Timely Structural Decisions

Making structural changes in your organization can be challenging in the advanced stages of your organization’s development. Another advantage of outsourcing data management services is the ability to identify a clear road map for timely decision-making to enact structural changes.

5. Comprehensive Security In The New Normal

A remote workforce infrastructure has become the new normal since the onset of COVID-19 for organizations across most industries. The flexibility of a remote workforce comes with the challenge of enforcing better security measures to protect data at work and other locations.

Managing data security in the office presents you with direct control over the use of devices and wireless networks, but what about securing data at other locations while ensuring security? The right managed data service provider empowers your remote workforce by providing adequate data security through encryption, threat management, and virtualization wherever necessary.

6. Streamlining Administration

Automating administrative functions has rapidly become the norm across all industries. It is critical to know your options and devise an effective strategy to schedule and share information through everything from voice assistants to integrated data centers. The right managed data service provider can facilitate setting up a system to automate and streamline administrative processes.

7. Staying Ahead Of The Curve

Outsourcing data management services to the right managed service provider also entitles your organization to benefit from their expertise in a rapidly changing environment. New technology advancements and features to innovate business processes keep springing up. Keeping track of innovative new technologies and features becomes possible when working with managed data service providers who stay atop the latest trends.

Leverage the Advantages Of Outsourcing Data Management Services With ZEMA

ZEMA is a platform that has proven itself as an effective managed data services provider in several data-intensive industries, including energy, commodities, agriculture, shipping, mining, insurance, finance, renewable energy, oil and gas, and utilities.

ZEMA can empower your business through its end-to-end data management solution and cloud analytics solutions to minimize organizational risks and maximize self-service data insights through access to a comprehensive and intelligent data management system. Consider booking a demo with ZEMA to learn more about the platform that has decreased the risk of data-driven decision-making through automated data collection, secure centralization, cloud analytics, dynamic analytics, automation of workflows and processes, and integration with third-party applications.

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Whether you are in Energy, Commodities, Agriculture, Mining, Shipping or a Market participant within a data-driven organization, you often find yourself overwhelmed by large volume of data that needs to be managed and analyzed. Further, the data is continuing to grow at an exponential rate; for example, the natural gas market alone can produce more than half a million data points on a daily basis.

Taking the time to manage vast amounts of data isn’t easy. It’s onerous, costly, and although it is not a core business focus, it is very time-consuming. Many organizations don’t have the resources required to undertake the task of managing high volumes of data. On the other hand, some organizations are expending valuable resources downloading market data from public and vendor source sites manually through custom ad hoc or segregated processes, normalizing this data, and distributing it to the right users to make informed decisions. All of these processes must occur before decision makers can even begin making sense of the data.

In order for data to be useful, market participants must be able to trust the quality of data they receive and quality is difficult to ascertain when data is collected and stored manually. System inefficiencies, interrupted flows of data, and human error can completely undermine the analysis process.

The Data Management Challenge

In order to get a handle on your business’ data needs it is important to establish what data you require from the outset. For example, if you need to create forward curves, you may need to access historical spot prices or exchange prices to complete the task. Ensuring that you’re working the correct data from the beginning will save you more time when it comes to making sense of the curve.

Another data challenge facing many businesses involved with data analysis is that they typically gather vast volumes of data from disparate sources in a myriad of formats; data may be published as a URL, PDF, CSV, or Excel file, for example. Some sources are made available to the public, while others must be purchased from private vendors. Different sources require different extraction and formation methods. The ability to collect data from any source in any format and granularity, validate this data, and integrate it with end users’ systems is the Holy Grail for business analysts, traders and risk managers alike.

Not the least of these data management concerns is that in many cases, the brightest minds in an organization may be spending hours collecting and normalizing data rather than analyzing it. Resources are typically very costly. Without centralized data, all data generated from varied systems becomes overwhelming and practically unusable in its raw form. Storing data long-term can be challenging; most normalized data ends up in data log files discarded on a regular basis.

Developing a database that ensures data is centralized and easy to access throughout the organization is essential for businesses with cost reduction and efficiency in mind. However, most organizations lack the necessary IT bandwidth or resources to perform such a task.

How can your company reduce the resources spent locating, collecting and normalizing data, and instead focus more energy on using that data to guide business critical decisions?

The Powerful, Integrated Solution

With the right data management solution, you can overcome the challenges associated with managing large amounts of data. At ZE PowerGroup, we have developed an award winning data management and analytics solution, ZEMA.  ZEMA is an enterprise data management and integration platform that offers advanced capabilities to meet specific data management requirements for analysts, traders and risk managers. ZEMA’s powerful automated data capturing application, Data Manager automatically captures, schedules, standardizes and stores tremendous volumes of data from multiple data providers across all industries worldwide, and pushes this data into one centralized database. ZEMA collects data from any source, in any format, and under any schedule.

ZEMA ensures the integrity of data is known by assuring data being collected is timely and accurate through automated data checking and validation procedures, enabling end-users to make rapid, consistent, and effective decisions.

To see how the ZEMA can empower your organization, book a personalized discovery call, watch our video or download our brochure.

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