In this week's podcast Thomas McGrath, CEO of Cognition, chats to Graham and Kevin about how big data can unlock operational trapped value in your business


Who is Thomas McGrath?
He is Chief Executive at Cognition, a company specialising in the industrial Internet of things and big data strategy solutions. The aim is to reduce costs to improve efficiency and minimise wastage.

Thomas resides in Dublin, Ireland and worked for several consulting companies before launching Cognition. He suggests his accent has part Cockney because of 15 years living in London.

Thomas McGrath CEO of Cognition
What question does Cognition answer?
Cognition captures data from your organisation, gets it out of the organisation, puts it into the Cloud, and generates a level of intelligence to make more management interventions. All this as opposed to businesses fumbling around in the dark. It exploits cloud and database processing power, previously not available.
What sort of information?
Thomas works with asset intensive organisations. For example regulated business, collecting data from assets, anything from pumps to buildings. Performance information. Energy, management control systems. Anything with 1s and 0s. This populates the jigsaw of the organisation.

Large organisation struggle to tap into this sort of information. There is a natural evolution of data capture. Oracle, provides legitimacy to the FD. Others on the C-suite, have accountability, but haven’t had assistance to make the right interventions.

Cognition makes the algorithms based on this data. The data arises from monitors, sucking out the information. A typical client will say they are drowning in reports, some say they don’t measure the right things and some nothing.
Applying Intelligence to the data
The intelligence often just sits inside their heads. They don’t have the sophisticated data evaluation in place. It’s about better performance.

Systematise routines in a business. Put metrics in systems which you don’t have. Monitors and control systems in silos. Cognition takes all the information to understand CAUSE and EFFECT. You start to make interventions that are intelligent.

Management hate NOT making decisions without information. Businesses do have rich data in their business, so Cognition help companies get at it.

Big Data allows you to look at issues you haven’t measured previously. The unknown unknowns. Donald Rumsfeld.

The reports you have now are the things you know about. To really get into operational improvement, data science can help you uncover stuff that can seriously help business. This is primarily an operational data science interface.

Cognition focuses on big data analytics to inform users to be more informed before they make that decision. It is resource usage and resource allocation.

Energy is a variable cost. There are things you can do to get usage down. Big Data has been used very successfully. If you want to reduce energy. How and when do you use energy. There will be lots of areas that are NOT looked at in this holistic fashion.

Without exposure to the real breakdown of costs will help organisations price their products better, because the usage will be recognised.

Monitor and track a lot more activity in the organisation, which means the FD will be able to have much more informed perspective.
Releasing Trapped Value
Trapped wind can be terribly painful. Anything that releases that trapped value. Cognition provides the right tablet to release the trapped value. Cognition advises how to understand how to avoid trapped value BEFORE it happens.

There are levers that drive cause and effect. If they pull a lever, what is the quantifiable effect. Resource or asset utilisation. How much water should you use, for example.

If you can, attach £signs next to each intervention.

Ultimately, it is a long Regression Formula. Lots of variables and possible outcomes.
Who is making progress?

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