Here is why miners need advanced analytics

EKA Software Solutions | April 18, 2016 | 10:53 am

Buying, selling, trading, procuring, moving and processing commodities are all data-intensive activities. When prices are volatile, supply chains are lengthy, and both supply and demand can be dramatically changed by external factors, evidence-based decision making is critical. Just one wrong decision can have significant consequences. Repeated wrong decisions can be terminal.

In the days when decision-making data were limited or unavailable, it was relatively easy to use simple tools to arrive at optimal conclusions about the business and its strategy. But the amount of data to be taken into account has grown exponentially. International markets have become more complex, markets more volatile and counterparties more diverse. In today’s circumstances, arriving at optimal decisions in a timely manner becomes impossible – even with the most complicated pivot tables in place.

For more and more commodities business, the answer lies in advanced analytics that turn the massive amounts of data now available into valuable insights. Here are four important ways modern analytics can help your business:

  1. Minimize your dependence on luck, hope or gut-feelings. Experience counts for a lot, but if it leads to over-dependence on hunches or memories of previous challenges, then its value is diminished. Markets are cyclical, but they are rarely identical – especially when what were previously considered once-in-a-generation events are now once-every-five-years events. Having a systemic way to produce good, evidence-based decisions is the only way to navigate this fast-changing environment – that’s what advanced analytics gives you.
  2. Gather all relevant information at your fingertips. In an environment where the number of variables can run into the thousands, fully informed decision-making relies on an awful lot of information. Advanced analytics can gather in one place all the data you need, from weather and shipping routes to market prices and global economics. It then displays all the connections between them, so you can make business decisions based on the complete picture.
  3. Give all your business users previously unavailable insights. It’s rare to find a commodities company without some form of analytics capability in place. But often they require specialized staff to input and query the relevant data. In today’s fast-paced business environment, that can be a prohibitively slow process. Modern analytics tools are based on the premise that analytics can deliver the most benefit when everyone in key business areas can use them – rather than depending on over-worked IT teams and statisticians.
  4. Find the answers you want, when you want them. Finally, modern analytics systems are designed to find the ‘unknown unknowns’ in your business. Whereas previous systems could only really respond to questions they had been programmed to answer – the known unknowns – new systems enable businesses to be far more proactive. With advanced analytics systems you can continue to drill down, ask more questions in real time and delve deep into the data to get the insights you are looking for.

If your organization is currently struggling with getting the insight it needs to the people who need it, then advanced analytics could well be the solution.