Dave Clarke

Clarke Analytics Ltd

Topic:

Enabling a data driven business decision culture to drive greater energy efficiency.

Synopsis:

Use of the term ‘data analytics  is becoming a catch all phrase for the secret to smart industry / manufacturing / grid / world. It is true that data analytics is an important component of driving new efficiencies and finding new business opportunities. However, data analytics alone is not the answer. Focussing primarily on data analytics in your Big Data project runs the risk of submerging the project in technical quagmires of choosing data platforms and algorithms to use over firstly understanding the business areas and questions to ask.

Article:

Problem statement/challenge:

One of the biggest challenges with data analytics projects is their reliance on an enterprise wide view of an organisations data. This necessitates a level of cross organisational collaboration not often as needed as in other projects. Also important is that the data analytics applied to your data needs to lead to a business insight that is actionable at the point in time that the insight is generated and that business action has a quantifiable result. Industry luminaries such as Jeff Bezos point to the data driven culture being key to success in the use of advanced analytics to find insights in large volumes of data. Culture takes time to foster and needs to be driven from the top of the organisation. It can be difficult to develop the right successes in an organisation to enable the data driven culture to grow.

Solution implemented

Over the last number of months, I have put together a 3 day digital plant accelerator course with key partners. Although originally design for life science manufacturing customers with my partner Enterprise System Partners, it can be applied with small changes to any manufacturing company. This paper outlines this accelerator course that is already seen by customers as an essential part of building the collaboration between business and IT so crucial to developing the data driven business decision culture
The course structure is set out below. The morning of Day 1 is open to anyone on site who has an interest in data analytics and especially those executives interested in digitally transforming their site. From the afternoon of Day 1, the course attendees split up in to small teams and work with data sets and market leading software to understand the business value available in the data analysed. On the afternoon of Day 3, those that have worked on analyzing data over the 3 days present their findings back to the interested parties.

Data analytics is central to the digital plant, and people and process are central to data analytics. The course builds on these key points:
• Agile Data Analytics Process: The technical teams work together in a step by step manner outlined on Day 1. If companies want to use their own data, some pre-work with the company will be needed. Otherwise, some open manufacturing data sets will be available.
• Collaboration: Each of the technical teams will have business, data and analytics roles from within the organisation, supported by skilled facilitators. This is a chance to build collaborative teams within the organisation that can go on to sustain a growing culture that makes data driven business decisions. This need for organisational collaboration is one of the central requirements on modern organisation data driven cultures
• Market Leading Analytics Tools: Attendees will get an overview of all of the market leading data and analytics layer software on Day 1, together with an overview of how and where to use key analytic algorithms from simple atomic level, to ensemble to deep learning auto-encoders. The software for this course has is provided by Tibco Software.

Results achieved

Having just been released in November 2018, full results of the courses impact are not available. However, all of the first three life science manufacturing customers that have review the course are interested in running it at their plants.

About Dave Clarke:

Dave Clarke has worked as a Data Scientist for several years, leading the development of data analytics services for multiple engagements. Since starting Clarke Analytics, he has developed data analytics architectures and strategies and built analytic solutions and dashboards at multiple customers, like J&J Depuy Synthes, Regeneron, Stryker, Musgraves and SGS to name a few. This work was not just management of these engagements but using market leading visualization tools as well as deeper dive statistical programming in R primarily
During 14 years with DellEMC, Dave led global teams in the development of validated and proven solutions in the Big Data Space. He is well versed in the resources required to design, build and set up large scale data solutions in both on-premise, cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
In setting up Clarke Analytics, Dave has built up many associate partnerships with data scientists, data architects and independent contractors in the field that he communicates with regularly. Dave can call on his wide network of associates to work with him on specific analytic requirements as and when needed. Dave continues to enjoy hands on development work and working closely with end users to meet their requirements.

About Clarke Analytics:

Clarke Analytics is a wholly owned Irish consulting company specializing in the area of data analytics and data science consulting and training. The company was set up in October 2016 by Dave and Helen Clarke.

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