Employee Spotlight: Holly Harrison
Data Analyst, Amentum’s Commercial Operations & Maintenance
“In God we trust, all others must bring data.” – W. Edwards Deming
Within the Commercial Operations & Maintenance (COM) sector, we provide a wide range of Facility Operations & Maintenance services to help our clients run their business. These services range from janitorial and landscaping services to high-tech robotics maintenance. Now more than ever, it is not enough to simply ‘perform well.’ You must show that you perform well. Companies across our industry are constantly being asked to demonstrate the value we bring to our clients. Whether it is reducing the cost of maintenance or increasing asset availability, clients want to see the value you bring to their organization in black and white…or in today’s age, rich and colorful interactive performance dashboards.
When it comes to showing value, data is paramount to driving key business decisions such as staffing levels (at existing sites and also when bidding new business), and forming overall business strategy with regards to finance, growth, marketing and sales. Data-driven decision making helps to remove some of the risk inherently present in nearly all business decisions. By removing the subjective elements from your business decisions and focusing on actual performance or records, you can instill confidence in yourself and your company as a whole. This confidence allows your organization to commit fully to a particular vision or strategy without being overly concerned that the wrong decision has been made.
My job is to find ways to interpret and present raw data. I have been a ‘numbers person’ my whole life. Math has always been my favorite subject, by far. I was on the Math Team all 4 years of high school (Illinois State Finalists). I find math somewhat relaxing, perhaps due to the fact it naturally lacks ambiguity. There are rules and facts, and generally one right answer. The challenge is giving the answers a meaning. Like Carly Fiorina once said, “We have to be able to turn data into information, and information into insight.” Knowing that superior data analytics is often a differentiator and crucial to the success of our organization, our COM team collaborated with Amentum’s Advanced Technology Office to enhance our data driven culture and tailor Amentum Analytics to best fit our needs. Amentum Analytics, powered by Microsoft Azure and PowerBI can combine large amounts of diverse data and quickly perform complex calculations to populate insightful dashboards. Essentially, turning data into insights automatically.
This provides tremendous value to our current clients. Not only in the metrics we are able to show, but also in the effort we don’t have to put forth to do so. Since the analytics platform is fully automated and frequently refreshed with new data, we are able to apply our resources and analysts to other value-add activity. Amentum Analytics is also attractive to potential clients. Our Business Development team often highlights our superior data analytics packages, such as plant layout heatmaps which show areas of increased work order requests with the ability to drill into the details of those requests.
We’ve only scratched the surface of what Amentum Analytics can do. We are already starting to incorporate various data sources and customized data visualizations to maximize the benefits of this cutting-edge tool. What started as a vision for basic work order performance metrics, will now become a centralized control center for various areas of performance measurement such as safety, finance, and reliability. I am excited about the endless data reporting possibilities this tool provides us and look forward to playing a key role as we turn those possibilities into reality.
