Success in the modern energy and commodity industry requires companies to adopt a proactive, data-driven approach. The COVID-19 pandemic created an environment of volatility in commodity markets, pushing companies to transform their energy supply chain into a strategic value chain through cost efficiency and enhanced processes. Many companies have adopted data automation and analytics tools to gain a competitive edge.
Here are the top 10+ things energy and commodity businesses should know about data automation in order to get ahead of the competition.
1. It Provides Cost Savings
Automating your data and digital processes can help unlock 40% to 75% in cost savings. You may think of 15-20% direct cost saving as a reasonable median estimate (assuming a client starts from little automation, lots of silos, etc.).
2. It Boosts Efficiency
Data automation gives a clear view of cost and ownership and helps devise plans to maximize efficiency in the following areas.
- Data collection
- Infra stuff (Software and hardware for data management)
- Governance (time spend defining, categorizing data (“ontology”), deciding which quality control fits what usage, and prioritizing reports)
- Cost of using data
3. It Ensures Regulatory Compliance
Data automation strengthens security, drives compliance, reduces risk, and helps companies stay on top of regulatory requirements. Ultimately, this frees up a lot of time, which businesses can invest in more critical matters.
4. It Delivers Relevant Data
Companies can break down data silos and yield relevant, contextualized data with data automation. This helps streamline business processes and saves time.
5. It Empowers Decision-Making
Data automation empowers decision-making across the business. Companies can convert data into actionable knowledge to make profitable decisions and achieve short and long-term goals.
6. It Helps Track Data Usage
Data automation tools help track data usage to manage and optimize licenses subscriptions. Companies can save millions of dollars this way.
7. It Promotes Process Accuracy
Intelligent automation tools allow companies to simplify and improve the accuracy of their processes, including Independent Price Verification and Mark-to-Market Trader Marks.
8. It Improves Data Synchronization
Data automation tools distinguish sources (where you can pull data from) and destinations (where you can push data). They enable you to determine a push and pull integration that fits your workflow.
9. It Adds to Your Business’s Resilience and Optionality
Alongside cost savings, data automation helps integrate resilience and optionality in various business areas. It improves your ability to identify vulnerabilities, such as a plant located in an unstable country and routes going through extreme weather, as well as your aptness to generate options to optimize maintenance and discover how much faster you can run some equipment.
The more data-driven a company is, the bolder the decisions it’ll make to scale the business.
10. It Supports Ambitious and Unique Transformation Plans
Data automation tools play an integral role in the success of ambitious transformation plans like decarbonization. These tools make it easy for businesses to implement tasks, assess early momentum, and track their progress and benefits.
11. It Ensures Data Security
Automation tools can help protect and provide immediate complete backup for enterprise data. This proves helpful when a company gets hacked.
Achieve Data Automation and Business Operations Excellence with ZEMA
ZEMA is an award-winning data management, integration, and analytics platform. It provides industry-best end-to-end management solutions and ensures 100% transparency and risk mitigation. We also have an award-winning ZE Cloud solution for Data Management in the Cloud.
Companies in the energy and commodity markets may anticipate likely resistance to the notion that the nuances of one’s job can be codified. However, with the proper involvement of experts and control consultants and ZEMA integration in existing processes, remarkable efficiency and cost savings can be achieved.
