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The sheer abundance of internal and public information and a lack of familiarity with next-generation data analytics tools can be an overwhelming challenge for many organizations. Corporate decision makers are often relying on incomplete information, with public datasets often being too difficult to incorporate meaningfully into their own corporate datasets. Achieving this is at the core of GeoCATATM, a remarkably nimble database tool that makes what was once a painstaking investigative exercise something that can now be quickly discovered with simple queries. Gone are the days of searching multiple public databases, combing through spreadsheets, and trying to connect the dots.
What is GeoCATATM?
Random Acronym is an employee owned, Canadian company that designs and implements industrial hardware and software solutions. Their Geographic Catalogue (GeoCATATM) Market Intelligence Platform is a dynamic data management tool that visualizes multiple origin datasets through one searchable map interface. Leading businesses have been using this tool to gain intelligence on key industry indicators, keep up to date on their assets, and understand competitors’ operations. The platform aggregates business and market intelligence, regulatory and environmental datasets, and project-specific spatial and tabular data. GeoCATATM makes hundreds of datasets available and viewable in a single software platform, providing users with both high level and focused perspectives of the competitive landscape of a region.
Leading Companies are Harnessing Public Datasets to Improve Corporate Intelligence, Unlocking a Competitive Advantage.
We spoke with the Director of Random Acronym, Marlon Fleming. He explains that,
“GeoCATATM was developed over time using user feedback from both internal and external users to meet the needs of a variety of user types; sales professionals, energy service providers, water managers, and regulatory and environment professionals are some of the more common users. It can be used for a variety of purposes, from high-level project planning to business intelligence, to a communication conduit for stakeholders. With GeoCATATM, users do not need to be Data Analysts or GIS [Geographical Information Systems] professionals to receive profound value from the platform.”
Business & Market Intelligence
Consulting firms and service companies looking to pinpoint market opportunities for their product or services have found tremendous value using GeoCATATM. Information is power, and a salesperson’s success can depend on how well they know a customer’s operations and challenges. With GeoCATATM, users can gather business and market intelligence in minutes that would previously require days to assemble. Offerings and solutions can be crafted around this business intelligence, bringing a competitive advantage to empowered organizations.
Avid user of GeoCATATM and Director of Strategic Development, Yves Matson, from Integrated Sustainability shares the value GeoCATATM brings to his role,
“A challenge most sales professionals face is that the first three quarters of client meetings are spent in discovery conversations trying to identify opportunities where an offering fits. The real advantage with using GeoCATATM is that you can do a lot of that discovery pre-emptively, often 50% or more. My team shows up to a meeting already knowing significant details about our prospects operations; we know what the implications are regarding where they are most active, what formation(s) they are active in, how many wells they are drilling per pad, how long their verticals are, and how many stages per frack.”
GeoCATATM is built around constantly updated public data and proprietary user data that can be filtered and saved in workspaces. These shareable workspaces are a living view into the data and can be shared across organizational lines. Yves goes on to share how GeoCATATM has improved information dissemination throughout the sales team,
“After doing discovery with a client, the big question was where does that information reside? Often in a notebook or in a CRM [Customer Relationship Management] platform. With GeoCATATM, I have a saved and shareable workspace for all my key clients. When I log-in, I have the information and layers that my team and I use and improve, and before my next meeting, I can pop into the workspaces to refresh myself on the operations of that client.”
Yves continues to explain how gathering this intelligence is scalable to his overall sales efforts,
“If I am successful with an offering to a specific producer, the best way to maximize my BD dollars is to sell the same offering to as many operators facing very similar challenges as I can. GeoCATATM enables me to not only find information on specific producers, but also find information on a region and extract who else may be facing those same challenges. You have a typified customer for that specific region, and you match your list of prospects to maximize BD efforts.”
Project Planning, Development, & Operations
Within organizations, GeoCATATM can also provide internal business intelligence to departments that need to better understand the operations of the entire company – not just their individual department or asset. Communication and information sharing can be a cumbersome task within large energy companies.
Marlon explains how GeoCATATM has been developed to support this need,
“Throughout the development of GeoCATATM, we discovered that many of our clients wanted to see the full picture within their own organizations. GeoCATATM was designed to bring a more complete picture to prospective business conversations, both from the client and third-party sales perspectives.”
Front-end project planning is made simpler using GeoCATATM. Project siting, feasibility studies, water transfer planning, pipeline routing, etc., can all be evaluated with the necessary environmental and regulatory information using one platform. The information can easily be packaged and communicated with all project stakeholders. Having the ability to efficiently evaluate and communicate this information sets the groundwork for other operational factors that may be required further into the project development, as well as anticipating and adapting to any mid-project operational changes.
The powerful GeoCATATM platform is designed for easy leveraging of diverse data repositories, providing industry and environmental context to support your project decisions. Proprietary project data can also be incorporated and kept private to the boundaries of an organization, providing even greater context against publicly available datasets, and allowing for efficient project planning, communication, and execution.
We spoke with Guillermo Guglietti, Water Advisor at Velvet Energy with operations in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. In the past, he has used GeoCATATM for project planning by determining the most ideal location to drill source groundwater wells, then communicates this information to a drilling contractor. He has also used GeoCATATM to evaluate the viability of large, fixed infrastructure projects based on the data of existing infrastructure assets.
“I use GeoCATATM all the time, it is a very versatile tool that I use for several otherwise time-consuming tasks. I have used it for planning water movements and routing layflats, investigating the likelihood of groundwater resources, and checking competition for water sources I’m looking to licence.”
For preliminary project planning, Guillermo has been able to use public data rather that conduct detailed and costly work such as technical field base investigations. Information may already be available for a given area through existing infrastructure, which allows for E&Ps to conduct inexpensive litmus tests to determine if the prospective project is viable before a detailed study is ever conducted.
“GeoCATATM has become a valuable tool in my role as a Water Manager. It has helped me to understand the region I operate in and displays development information as well as current and historic water related data. I am able to identify business opportunities and challenges before I encounter them in the field.”
GeoCATATM was built for handling your diverse data. Enable your team to correlate and analyze your valuable datasets effectively and efficiently.
Do more with your data. Contact us today to maximize the value of your datasets.
Jeff Coombes M.Sc., ISSP-SA
Strategic Development
403.512.1688
Jeff.Coombes@Random-Acronym.com
www.random-acronym.com
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