Data-driven Cement
When I think of cement, I don’t think about complex data analytics. This week at our Roundtable in Zurich, I realized how analytics have become part of every business. Our tour of Holcim’s cement facility became a vivid example for the Roundtable discussion. Cement production uses an extremely high-temperature (2000C) process to transform raw minerals into the final product. Fossil fuels such as coal, heavy fuel oil or gas are commonly used. However, Holcim has developed production approaches that can use waste products as substitutes for more than 50% of fuel. Seemingly any solid waste can become both fuel and a raw material for production of cement clinkers. Ground tires, plastic, hazardous material, and animal waste can all be employed. The alternative disposal for many of these waste products is incineration or landfills. By using waste products as alternative fuel in cement-making, both Holcim and society benefit. But controlling the exact mixture of fuel, waste, and raw production inputs to ensure precise cement formulations requires extensive process monitoring and analytics. A visit to the production control room brought this all home—IT enabled analytics used to control a complex process and all supervised by a single control room operator!
Applying this example to business management, the Roundtable discussion concluded that analytics requires a deep understanding of the business processes to find the right data and then convert it to real information and ultimately business intelligence. Business analytics is not a fishing trip, blindly trolling oceans of data for insight. Rather it is combining sophisticated analysis with human intelligence to produce real business breakthroughs. Sometimes that means less data is more insight. In every case it requires managers to be actively involved in the knowledge generation process.