The amount of data that companies can draw upon is overwhelming. Many market participants within the energy, commodity, and financial industries need help determining which data sets to draw upon to address and, in some cases, identify pressing business issues that need resolving.
When attempting to manage high volumes of data, market participants tend to focus on data volumes alone, and can lose sight of the validation and entitlement aspects of data management.
In fact, there are many challenges associated with managing data, which may arise during collection, validation, managing privilege rights, and storing data; through to transformation, manipulation, and analysis. Inefficiencies in any of these processes can have repercussions for decision makers who are trying to formulate the best strategies to meet changing business needs.
The Challenge of Collecting, Standardizing, and Validating Data
Many companies lack a coherent approach to making sense of the invaluable business data that’s flowing into their organizations. As data is gathered, it needs to be standardized and normalized. Moreover, integral data needs to be isolated from insignificant data; accurate data separated from erroneous data. In addition, most companies collect vast volumes of data but they don’t have comprehensive approaches for centralizing the information. According to a recent survey by Enterra Insights, only 27% of the more than 250 companies studied, responded saying that they integrate data from different sources into a centralized database.
Furthermore, executives often ignore data management because they find it incomprehensible. In a separate survey by Deloitte, 31% of executives said that they don’t understand how data can help them move the needle. According to Enterra Insights, “45 % of respondents said that they lacked the capacity to analyze large volumes of data and only 24% of respondents use data for actionable insight.” A well-conceived approach to collecting data from different sources, as well as the right analytics tools, can go a long way in helping business leaders streamline and make sense of all this data.
Issues Analyzing and Visualizing Data
Another challenge when working with large volumes of data is how to analyze and display results of data exploration in a way that is meaningful and not overwhelming. The right analytics tools are required to make sense of the large volumes of data collected; however, most companies’ resources to collect and store, and visualize the data are disjointed. Additionally, traditional architectures and software find it difficult to process huge amounts of data in a timely manner, thus requiring you to make compromises and aggregate the details you want to analyze and visualize. Even the most common descriptive statistics calculations can become complicated when you are dealing with large volumes of data, and even more difficult to visualize.
The ZEMA Solution
At ZE PowerGroup Inc, we have developed an award winning data management software solution, ZEMA. ZEMA is an enterprise data management software solution that offers advanced capabilities to meet specific data management requirements for analysts, traders, and risk managers.
ZEMA’s powerful automated data capturing application automatically captures, schedules, standardizes and stores tremendous volumes of data from multiple data providers across all industries worldwide, and pushes this data into one centralized database.
ZEMA ensures the integrity of data is known, assuring data being collected is timely and accurate through automated data checking and validation procedures. Thus, end-users are able to make rapid, consistent, and effective decisions. Data compliance is made easy with ZEMA. It allows companies to manage user permissions in order to provide increased security, auditability, and reporting on data usage.
ZEMA’s analytical function offers a wide range of opportunities to analyze large amounts of data; data transformation and manipulation options include filtering, aggregation, interpolation, extrapolation, and date shifting.
ZEMA possesses an easy-to-use interface that enables the visualization of data through customizable graphs and tables, making it easy to recognize evolving market patterns, and query and analyze results. Users can apply conditional formatting, apply standard graph options, filter results, and change date ranges. Different data series can be aligned against one another and viewed across a single graph or multiple graphs. ZEMA features an intuitive, customizable dashboard that offers a dynamic market snapshot of a variety of external and internal information.
ZEMA: Analytics Solution from ZE PowerGroup on Vimeo.
To learn more about how our award winning data management software solution for energy, commodity, and financial markets can meet your data management, data analysis, and data visualization needs, watch our video, contact us for a live demonstration tailored for your company, or download our brochure.