By Magdalena Stępniak
According to Experian’s 2016 Global Data Management Benchmark Report, 84% of businesses believe that data is an integral part of forming a business strategy. This is a far cry from the reality of a few decades ago, when data management only contributed to operational efficiency. Today, data management has become the basis for strategic decisions involving millions of euro, dollars, and pounds.
But what kind of challenges lie ahead for all the big companies that need to work with data? Almost a quarter of the data gathered around the world is believed to be inaccurate. In big organizations, data is often scattered around, with no central point of management. When there is a central point, the data is usually concentrated in the hands of IT people. This presents a clear challenge: how do you manage data if your facilities are located in different countries around the world? How do you follow and comply with all the different energy specific regulations and tariffs across the globe?
Let the figures speak for themselves – if your company has just one plant in one country, buying two commodities – how does that translate into data? For this site alone, you are looking at 2 contracts, with a minimum of 4 price fixing confirmations and 24 invoices from two suppliers over a 12-month period -which each include with a minimum of 10 line items per invoice. That brings us to a minimum of 246 data entries per year - not to mention the thousands of measurements for natural gas and electricity. Multiply 246 by 10 sites and 20 connections points and you already have 4,920 data entries. If you add country-specific price structures, wholesale markets, different suppliers and local regulations for grid fees and taxes, you can end up with a mass of incompatible and unmanageable data. What’s more, your UK site buys natural gas in pence per therm, Belgium in euro per MWh and the US in dekatherms, Hungary in forints, Poland in zlotys. All of sudden, answering your CEO’s question: “how much energy do we consume, how much do we spend and how do we buy it?”, is not so easy.
The key to effective and time-to-value data management on a global portfolio is to focus on data capturing, validation, standardization and presentation. A good solution requires dedicated resources, relevant technical skills and the newest technology. The best energy data management solutions are developed solely for that purpose, providing flexible and tailor-made data quality tools.
E&C Consultants has developed an excellent solution for managing energy data on a global scale. Our data management platform is highly accessible, flexible, and large enough in terms of geographic footprint to support your current and future data management needs. We can provide our clients with ongoing access to all contracts, price fixations, invoices, calculations, reports, budgets, risk analyses, historical data, market prices, consumption figures, management resumes and any other desired tools – per site, per country, per commodity, per month, per year, per legal entity, in any configuration needed - all 100% shared and downloadable from their own tailor made website. Our constantly updated market intelligence and highly customized reporting are a big help when having reliable data is indispensable to taking important business decision across sites and across countries.
With E&C’s global energy data management tools you can rest assured that your strategic decisions are based on reliable information.
You are probably among the 79% of organizations that believe it is difficult to predict when and where the next data challenge will arise – would you like to be prepared? Then register to our Transatlantic Energy Conference!
The first leg of our event is being held in Amsterdam on Thursday, September 22nd and the second will take place in Chicago on Wednesday, October 5th: www.eecc.eu/TEC
