In response to my previous post titled Big Data: The Coming Sensor Data Driven Productivity Revolution, some one asked me if I had few good case studies that highlight effective use of Big Data. I would like to share following four excellent Big Data case studies that shows how large corporations have started leveraging Big Data for driving productivity and increasing ROI:
TXU Energy – Smart Electric Meters:
In my blog quoted above, I indicated that “Because of smart meters, electricity providers can read the meter once every 15 minutes rather than once a month. This not only eliminates the need to send some one for meter reading, but as the meter is read once every fifteen minutes, electricity can be priced differently for peak and off-peak hours. Pricing can be used to shape the demand curve during peak hours, eliminating the need for creating additional generating capacity just to meet peak demand, saving electricity providers millions of dollars worth of investment in generating capacity and plant maintenance costs.”
Well, I have a smart electric meter in my home and one of the electricity providers in my area (TXU Energy) is using the smart meter technology to shape the demand curve by offering “Free Night time Energy Charges — All Night. Every Night. All Year Long.” (See this for more).
In fact, they promote their service as “Do your laundry or run the dishwasher at night, and pay nothing for your Energy Charges”. What TXU Energy is trying to do here is to re-shape energy demand using pricing so as to manage peak-time demand resulting in savings for both, TXU and customers. This wouldn’t have been possible without Smart Electric meters.
T-Mobile USA has integrated Big Data across multiple IT systems to combine customer transaction and interactions data in order to better predict customer defections. By leveraging social media data (Big Data) along with transaction data from CRM and Billing systems, T-Mobile USA has been able to “cut customer defections in half in a single quarter”.
US Xpress, provider of a wide variety of transportation solutions collects about a thousand data elements ranging from fuel usage to tire condition to truck engine operations to GPS information, and uses this data for optimal fleet management and to drive productivity saving millions of dollars in operating costs.
McLaren’s Formula One racing team uses real-time car sensor data during car races, identifies issues with its racing cars using predictive analytics and takes corrective actions pro-actively before it’s too late! (for more on T-Mobile USA, US Xpress and McLaren’s F1 case studies refer to this article on FT.com)
