Business Intelligence in Energy Sector

Energy Efficiency :-

In today’s world, where with every passing day the need for energy is increasing exponentially, the coal and other fossil reserves are depleting, energy efficiency has became a hot topic and couldn’t have been more relevant. Energy efficiency basically means using less energy to provide the same service. Energy efficiency can be done by a number of things like better usage of electronic instruments, less energy guzzling devices, more usage of solar & renewable energy resources etc. Business Intelligence in energy sector tends to tackle such challenges.

Business Intelligence helps in collecting, measuring, collating, analyzing the data and giving actionable intelligence which can lead to energy saving. The BI solution should be such that it should be able to suffice the needs of all the business users without compromising on the flexibility or the ease of usage.

Any BI solution which is generally used in energy domain needs to help in better decision making in business areas which includes :-

a. Demand Intelligence: Reports and historical trends from historical data to be used affectively to predict energy usage, monitor energy cost, track and monitor service availaibility, downtime, monitor energy and utility demand and distribution etc. A proper BI can also help in analyzing and developing sustainable distribution models.

b. Risk Intelligence: A proper BI solution should be able to analyze predictive models and risk-reward curves to determine risks associated with energy trading.

c. Asset Intelligence: It should help in analyzing energy generation and outages leading to even better management of field employees, partners and affiliates. Monitor equipment usage and act to resolve issues in real-time. It also facilitates in tracking and monitoring equipment for preventive maintenance and replacement, track asset usage and efficiency.

d. Customer Service Intelligence: Providing dashboards to monitor and streamline call center operations, analyze call and service center response wait and times to reduce cost and increase efficiencies.

Energy Insights had in one of their survey found that BI is the number one IT investment for energy companies. Now, more and more companies in energy domain are realizing the importance of BI and the value addition it can provide. Below are the trends which is seen in BI adoption in energy sector,

1. Information Quality :-

With data being generated from thousands of different kind of devices and softwares, immense business value can be unlocked if this data is accurate. This data related issue is existent in the entire vertical of companies i.e. From exploration, production, trading, end users etc.

Information quality issue importance is being recognized by organizations since poor information quality hinders proper decision making and efficiency. Also, to achieve improved information quality, traditional data cleansing and profiling need to be supplemented with data governance, master data management, meta data management, data certification and auditability, and data protection

2. Master Data Management :-

MDM market has been growing at a rate of 14% per year. Master data has information about an organizations key business entities like customers, products, vendors etc, with the goal of ensuring semantic consistency across organizational and business process lines and simplifying process and data integration.

Energy companies need to rely on critical data from different places like partners, clients, commodities, supplier, transmission, distribution, devices etc, but unfortunaetly this critical data is managed by very disparate, redundant and often external information system. MDM should be able to address this complex, disparate, disintegrated data sources. MDM should not only take care of the technology but also the business side of the requirement.

3. Data Governance :-

Data governance is responsible for strategic direction for information quality efforts, sets standards and processes, and ensures that information quality goals are achieved.

Most of the companies still consider enterprise information management as a technology solution involving data warehouse, data migration, ETL and data visualization/presentation via BI. But an ideal solution should be encompassing IT and business needs. Even though data governance is not an easy task but its very important for a good enterprise information management.

4. Enterprise level BI :-

With more and more disparate data source, more mobile workforce and need of quicker decision making, more and more energy companies are adopting enterprise BI technologies. It should take care of all the repors, dashboads, analysis, analytics and all the requirement of the different department/ hierarchies etc. Achieving enterprise-level BI often requires significant process and organizational changes, as well as a solid enterprise-level BI strategy and architecture that address the goals and objectives of both the business and IT.

5. Enterprise level Data Transparency :-

Having a proper data transparency helps in tracking any data from its source, and understanding the evolution/changes of the same over the path. Metadata management can help in having a better data transparency. As far as energy companies are concerned, data transparency is even more important since because of innumerable regulatory, health and safety compliance’s.

6. Actionable Business Intelligence :-

Most of the companies still think that BI is used only for historical reporting and trend analysis, whereas BI is much more than that. A proper BI system in place can help in real-time operational or tactical metrics, managing and presentation of KPIs. Many companies find it difficult to provide a set of KPIs to be used and followed, and this processes has to be done right at the starting of the Business Intelligence suite implementation. Also, the operational metrics should be perfectly aligned with companies mission and vision.

A good well implemented BI can help a company in predictive analytics, optimizing investment, data driven decisions etc.

 Experience in Energy Sector :-

Helical IT Solution has got immense expertise in energy sector. The work done includes

– Data loading, data integration, data aggregation, data cleansing, data validation, data standardization and data integrity from different sources/devices/meters

– Google maps and google earth integration – To show devices consumption from different meters with hover information, heat maps, selection parameters, toggle switches etc

– Different interactive, parametrized reports (both operational and transactional reports) with drill down and drill through capabilities like Kwh usage report, annual usage report, Total Harmonic Distortion Voltage by feeder, THD by feeder, Waveform current, waveform voltage, Substation report, VAR mgmt report, VA reactance report, monthly meter report, historical monitoring report, meter health availability percentage report,

– Drill down/drill through dashboards with interactivity like annual summary usage dashboard,

– Mobile compatible reports and dashboards which can be even hosted on cloud, security implemented with userid

– Setting triggers/alerts for any specific action like data not coming, crossing of a threshold etc

– Email automation so that reports/dashboards can be automatically mailed to stakeholders in specified format (doc, xls, odt, pdf, html etc)

– Creation of real time reports and dashboard like realtime transformer monitoring report

– Creation of data warehouse and data mart

– Adhoc reports so that end users can himself drag & drop and create his own reports, visualize it using different charts, download, mail

– OLAP view for ability to drill down in data at any level to have the root cause analysis

– What if analysis

– Analytics to predict future usage, downtime etc

– Solution integration with your existing software/website/portlet/application

– Single window view on Liferay portlet showing many windows like reports, dashboards, analytics, google maps, weather information, calendar etc

There is much more functionality which can be put be it in terms of reports, dashboards, data visualization, analysis and analytics, integration, interactivity etc.

Please get in touch with me at nikhilesh@helicaltech.com to know more about our work, demo, business collaboration and opportunities

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