Data to Insights

Curious Joe and Genius Jane had talked about Data in the Cloud the last time they met while traveling. Curious Joe wanted to understand the steps to go from data to insights and Genius Jane promised him that she would talk about these sometime later.

That opportunity came about when Curious Joe happened to meet Genius Jane at a factory. Coincidentally both had come to meet the same acquaintance there.

Curious Joe: “Hey Jane, what a pleasant surprise to see you here!”

Genius Jane: “Hi Joe. Nice to see you here. I was just about to leave. I’m on my way home. I came to meet Greg regarding some help he needed on the story behind some data visualization”

Curious Joe: “Sounds cool. What were some of the interesting insights you’ve uncovered? Were there decisions taken? Anything you could share? I’m really keen to learn how to turn data into insights.”

Genius Jane: “Well…Joe, I can’t go into specifics. However, I could give you a broad sense of the flow. You see this production line here? It moves the packaged products along this conveyor down to the warehouse area where the boxes are eventually put in trucks and shipped to their destination. Each box passes under that black bridge there that’s over the conveyor. It has several sensors and cameras. Together they can determine the size of the box, the number of boxes passing under including the rate at which they pass by per minute. These boxes contain different products and the sensors can pick up what’s inside by scanning the RFID sticker tags that affixed on each box.”

Curious Joe: “Given the number of boxes I’ve seen pass by as you were talking, I’d say that’s a lot of data getting collected. Where does the data end up and why is this data important?”

Genius Jane: “The sensors and cameras pass the data and images on to a hardware controller that streams the data to the cloud. The controller is connected to the internet. This setup is just one of several installed in the factories of the company.”

Curious Joe: “You mean all the factories are streaming their data to the cloud all the time?”

Genius Jane: “Yes, that’s right, in near real-time. Once the data reaches the cloud it is stored in an efficient file format in the cloud data lake. There are tools available to enrich the data with reference data — such as adding the factory location to the incoming sensor data. This data can then be visualized with Business Intelligence tools.”

Curious Joe: “So what does one look for when using these tools?”

Genius Jane: “Getting to know something one would not otherwise get to know about. Once you start viewing the data along with other data sets such as sales-related data, macro-economic and seasonal trends, you can start gaining deeper insights.”

(Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash)

Curious Joe: “What kind of insights?”

Genius Jane: “ Well, what’s being produced where and in what quantity at the factories is centrally known thanks to the sensors and cameras sending in the data. Balancing supply and demand can make a difference in customer satisfaction and profitability. If we know that sales of jackets are spiking in the suburbs, we’d want to quickly check if the production of jackets in the factories located in the nearby suburbs can meet the demand. Visualization software can plot the trend of demand versus expected supply. If it looks like there is going to be a shortfall of jackets, then the factory managers can be informed to step up production by a specific quantity.

Everyone gets their new jackets and everyone’s happy. Over time one can learn about which neighborhoods need what products at which time of the year. And also spot changing trends as they start happening. Right towards the beginning. Isn’t that knowledge useful and powerful?”

Curious Joe: “That’s awesome. What else can we learn from the data?”

Genius Jane: “The data showed a few factories producing a larger than the average number of hats. On researching further, it was discovered these factories were located near designer fashion shops hubs. For some reason, these fashion shops were purchasing hats in large quantities. Someone in the company started a partnership program with these fashion shops. As a result, more hats were sold than ever and the shops became priority customers. Now that’s discovering cool insights of value.”

Curious Joe: “I never thought about data that way. Each factory gets a system-generated report on what is trending and is enabled to make data-driven decisions. That’s what that display showing all those charts and numbers on the wall over there is all about. Also spotting patterns such as co-location of producer/consumers could end up being mutually beneficial. This is all so exciting to hear. Could you tell me of other similar stories on deriving actionable insights from data?”

Genius Jane: “Sure Joe. Let’s save that for another day. Remember, I’m on my way home?”

Curious Joe: “Yes, of course. Looking forwards to it, Jane! You are a genius.”

(Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash)

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.