C/ETRM & Business Intelligence: Are you a Data Driven company already?

They say that data is the world’s new currency or the new oil. Ongoing digitization has created vast streams of data, considered as corporate assets that enterprises try to leverage in a ‘Data Economy’ to improve efficiencies and drive revenue growth. In the field of commodity/energy trading, a next-generation and integrated C/ETRM system can capture this data in what is often called a single ‘version of the truth’. This way, data-driven companies take advantage of multiple sources of data to improve and speed up their decision-making processes. By having superior Business Intelligence reporting, data-driven companies can have superior insights. Power BI is integrated in Hitachi Energy C/ETRM solution and provides a powerful reporting tool enabling Business Intelligence with live dashboards through compelling visualization. Are you a data-driven company already?

According to a Forrester study, 74 percent of all companies would like to be more data-driven, but only 29 percent claim that they are actually good at putting this idea into action. To companies still relying on silos of Excel Spreadsheets or legacy systems, a modern cloud-based Software-as-as-Service C/ETRM, such as TRMTracker, offers comprehensive front-to-back functionality and enables making the step to digital transformation easier. Organizations increasingly realize that in order to stay competitive, data is the fuel for success. Insights from data helps them to innovate and make smarter decisions based on facts, instead of gut feeling.

Being data-driven is about giving the business decision makers the power to explore data and make decisions. Fact-based decisions, powered by business intelligence reporting, enable organizations to more accurately define their strategy and be successful. Data visualization therefore is no longer an obscure field in modern C/ETRM and is now used to present insights effectively and attractively. By visualizing data in different types of graphics and charts, outcomes become easy to understand – at a glance.

TRMTracker empowers users with integrated Power BI for transactional data analytics. It helps them see and understand their data. Leveraging the system’s real-time processing capability and existing data views, the integrated Power BI functionality enables users to create rich, interactive reports with visual analytics at their fingertips and deploy those as native reports within TRMTracker or Mobile App. As a result, they can be easily accessed by other users thereby streamlining the decision-making process by traders, portfolio managers, forecasters, settlement staff, and business leaders for actionable insights.

For instance, consider balancing markets with 15-minute or less intervals. Not being able to visualize that data in an accurate position and being able to act on it may deliver unexpected imbalance charges from the grid operator. Time is of the essence and therefore easy access to reporting that visualize the opportunities is a prerequisite. User-friendly dashboards that allow to slice and dice the data make it easier to keep an eye on key performance indicators.

It doesn’t matter how much data you collect. What matters is that it gets into the right hands and the right time to make the right business decisions. With a modern self-serve analytics approach to business intelligence, interactive, visual analysis empowers those close to the data to discover new insights.

In a Data Economy, digital customers seek to harness data for business decision making. Moreover, the world is moving from products to services into what has been coined as a Subscription Economy. Today’s availability of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) C/ETRM solutions with integrated Business Intelligence reporting makes it possible for more companies to become data-driven – by enabling them to manage their data better, run more complex analyses and visualize outcomes in a more understandable way. With a modern rapid deployment environment such as TRMTracker, they will be well on their way to becoming a data-driven organization.

Learn more about energy trading and risk management (ETRM) from Hitachi Energy.