Analytics: Turning Data into Insight

February 21st, 2017 ProActivity News

More data has been created in the past two years than from 2014 to the beginning of time and by 2020 at least a third of all data will pass through the cloud.

As 2017 begins, we see one of the major trends taking an even bigger stage: Big Data. The key with big data is analyzing it. This is so much data across our corporations that it's a bit overwhelming to figure out what to do with it all.

How do we analyze our various incident statistics, training information, environmental metrics, audits and even EHS compliance and corporate tasks to gain insight into operational performance? The first step is deciding which metrics are the most valuable to your corporate initiatives. From there you can start to normalize the data you are gathering around that. We will want to focus on standard answers that have been defined for our users to pick from. This means trending on dropdowns, checklists, picklist values and organizational wide data sets that are simply chosen from a pre-determined list. This gives us a normalized set of values to choose from and gives us much more meaningful data to analyze.

Once we have determined the data sets that provide us the most insight into our corporate metrics, we can start to build around those and display the data in a meaningful way. We can create reports and dashboards that give us a consolidated look at these metrics in both a raw data and graphical representation. We can now take our total incident rate at one location and compare it to another based on facility size. We see how many tasks are overdue this month versus completed with how many are still yet to be finished and correlate that to manpower. Your Environmental, HealthandSafety system can now give you meaningful insight into organizational performance.

With Dakota’s Business Intelligence tools you can utilize all of the data from your EHS Compliance Calendars, configurable SmartForms, and Auditor protocols in a meaningful way that provides vital insight into organizational performance.

I've actually written a white paper that expands upon this topic. It is entitled "Analytics to Insight: The Path to predictive EHS Management," and it discusses the importance of data, how to set standards and goals, establishing leading indicators and more. To download the white paper, click here or the link below.