Custerian

Approaching LCR 4.0

Custerian were interested in accessing world-leading facilities and capabilities around cloud-based solutions and resources. The company wanted to learn more about the Industry 4 technology so they could offer their own clients high level analytics of publically available data, enabling them to identify signs of stress within their own organisation. Custerian wanted to use global data resources such as cloud, to identify operational issues of a more local nature including social media networks.

Partner Support

The Daresbury Laboratory team put Custerian in touch with STFC’s Hartree Centre based on the awareness of the facilities available and expertise within the Hartree Centre. The team investigated the feasibility of applying social media analytics to identify signs of organisational stress within the user community.

Using the Hartree Centre’s IBM Power8 cluster, Custerian was able to accelerate the data collection and analysis processes. The Hartree Centre also provided programming and data analytics support, alongside project management and expertise in IBM Cloud services by linking Custerian with IBM project architects and engineers.

Results

This ambitious first project wanted to identify a correlation between organisational stress and the logistics sector by interrogating publically accessible data sets.

Custerian needed to gather organisation specific data that was held in internal databases, which was then compared with public data. This provided a more complete view of internal and external influences which highlight factors contributing to stress within a company such as a lack of colleague engagement and resources.

Other work included profiling logistics companies against customer sentiment such as the way customers feel companies handle their concerns such as speed and style of response and lack of direct apology.

The data also highlighted customer concerns directed towards a number of depots within specific areas in terms of volumes and intensity of queries and complaints which highlights to Custerian areas in which their services may offer the greatest value.

Working into the Future

This support will help Custerian offer their clients more in-depth and valuable insights including identifying signs of stress. This could also help to acquire new clients through better identifying those clients who could benefit from their help and expertise.

To further investigate the importance of additional organisation-specific data, the aim is to now proceed to the next stage of the solution; looking to partner with external companies in specific sectors to work collaboratively on a the “sentinel” role, a system for being able to help in early identification of the source and cause of stress within companies.

Custerian admitted to being surprised at how finegrained the information was that could be extracted, considering the broad scope of the initial project objectives. In addition, Custerian are very happy with the emergence of a clear plan for taking the work to the next stage and feel the overall process enabled clarification of feasibility using cloud-based technologies for organisational challenges.