Analytics is often seen as a luxury or a “nice to have”, and treated as a noncritical —  environment for the business. Yet the development of an Analytics centre of excellence (ACE) can add considerable value to the business through addressing, among other issues, large volumes of unutilised data, the installation of effective asset management systems and the creation of proactive analytic solutions, says Hari Khamandula, technical director at Dake Solutions.

He will explore the benefits of and challenges to be met when striving to deliver best practice analytics through an ACE, at the ITWeb Business Intelligence 2014 Summit later this month.

“With a methodology underwritten by our common sense business approach, we have been delivering best-practice analytics solutions for over 12 years. Encompassing critical organisational aspects such as governance, technology, processes and people, profound advances and solutions have been made in the fields of analytics business infrastructure, grid analytics and customer segmentation. These, in turn, are all driven from the establishment of an ACE,” he says

Touching on the installation of proper asset management systems, Khamandula believes traditional systems have not been very successful in predicting equipment failures.

“It is important that all activities, including the usage that happens relating to the asset, should be associated to the asset itself. Thus, asset management systems have to be able to accommodate asset analytics or make the data accessible to the external analytics environments for forecasting the maintenance.”

He adds that Dake Solution’s ACEs work off standardised information models and are built on scalable architecture that is technology-agnostic.

Companies that typically gain the greatest benefits from ACEs, says Khamandula, are those operating in the utilities, banking and finance, aerospace, government, healthcare, insurance and logistics industry sectors.