4 Data Analytics Success Stories
There is a lot of hype out there about Big Data's ability to transform your business and how the latest analytics can revolutionize every aspect of human existence. But does the hype match up to reality? Enterprise Apps Today looked around for some successful analytics use cases and found four interesting ones.
Analytics? It's Electric
Who would have thought that theft of electricity would be a big issue? Yet Elizabeth Fletcher, deputy director of the Smart Metering and Infrastructure Program at Canadian utility BC Hydro, tells of losses of $100 million in one year due to pilfering, much of it from marijuana growers who need constant light for their crops. On a small scale, they steal it by bypassing the meter at a household level. The more enterprising do it at the transformer, substation or even directly from high voltage lines.
BC Hydro already employed field investigators to find wrongdoers, but it realized that feet on the ground weren’t enough. They needed to more efficiently zero in on areas of potential theft.
To combat the issue, the company rolled out 1.9 million smart meters at houses and businesses. The meter data is fed into a Pivotal Greenplum database and an EMC data lake where it is analyzed. The company ties this data into SAP systems and its own proprietary systems which have geospatial features to detect discrepancies in voltage patterns.
“These discrepancies are sometimes a data issue, but often help our investigators identify theft,” said Fletcher. “Analytics is helping us achieve our goal of a 75 percent reduction in electrical theft.”
The company is now adding in SAS for predictive analytics in order to conduct what is known as energy balancing. This entails being able to measure exactly the amount of energy coming into the grid and reconcile it against the amount consumed. The company has elaborate methods of estimating this metric, but it is now assembling an exact way to calculate it and then analyze it. SAS will help the company view this information across the entire power grid, then drill down into regions and districts too.
Analytics and Wearable Tech
Geneia is a health care technology and consulting company working with clinical information and medical records to help health care organizations deliver better care at a lower cost. It wants to improve decision making, both by health care providers and patients, so that the right actions are taken at the right time and unnecessary actions are eliminated.
The company is building a platform known as Theon to make this possible. While a huge amount of medical information exists in hospital systems, it is spread across disparate databases and repositories. While consolidating that information can help, Geneia wants to go beyond simple data consolidation. So it is incorporating wearable devices to do such things as take vitals and record EKG readings.
Having a flood of valuable data increases the likelihood of correct decision making. The challenge now is to narrow it all down in enough time to make a difference. Geneia is adding SAS analytics to analyze medical information in real time and predict when intervention is necessary.
For example, health care providers want to know how likely a patient is to follow treatment or develop complications. The Geneia Theon platform sits on top of a mountain of electronic medical record files. It is able to sift through all that data, estimate likely outcomes and suggest the best courses of action.
One health care provider utilizing Theon used this approach to develop a list of recently discharged people who could benefit from more thorough home monitoring to avoid emergency room visits or readmission. Analytics also spotted high risk areas, such as people who had run up large medical bills yet had not been seen by a physician in over a year.
Wearable devices add to the scope of Big Data analytics. With patients wearing them, data flows to Theon in constant streams. SAS has to analyze this, perform risk analytics and add value by focusing attention on where it needs to be.
“Wearable technology means a lot of data comes in, much of which is noise as well as a lot of false positives,” said Avishek Mukherjee, CTO of Geneia. “Adding predictive real-time analytics helps us to improve the effectiveness of patient monitoring.”
Analytics and the Supply Chain
The supply chain is an obvious place to harness the power of analytics. Chainalytics, a supply chain consulting and analytics firm, provides transportation market research to more than 140 organizations worldwide. It maintains data on more than $25 billion worth of transportation costs, as well as millions of transactions.
It uses Tableau Online to share information faster and provide self-service access to cloud-based visualizations used in decision making. This makes a big difference to buyers of transportation services, who spend anywhere from $5 million to over $1 billion per year for the intelligence. By communicating complex market pricing and research that explains where members stand against their peers, how transportation rates are trending and how their partners are supporting their cost and service goals through policy decisions, Chainalytics aims to help its clients cut transportation costs.
Matt Harding, vice president of Freight Market Intelligence Consortiums at Chainalytics, said spreadsheets and databases could not adequately support custom insights. Such reports only answered common questions and didn’t go deep enough With Tableau Online, the company added a standardized front-end on customer specific data that allows rapid and free-flowing navigation while providing a visualization experience not available from spreadsheets.
“Our customers can assess millions of shipment records within minutes or hours, compared to weeks before, and without any IT support or training,” said Harding. “They can quickly determine evolving business strategies with their partners, communicate to the C-level and change the way people look at the business of transportation and the supply chain.”
Drew Robb is a writer who has been writing about IT, engineering, and other topics. Originating from Scotland, he currently resides in Florida. Highly skilled in rapid prototyping innovative and reliable systems. He has been an editor and professional writer full-time for more than 20 years. He works as a freelancer at Enterprise Apps Today, CIO Insight and other IT publications. He is also an editor-in chief of an international engineering journal. He enjoys solving data problems and learning abstractions that will allow for better infrastructure.
