How Can Accurate Weather Data Improve Your Business Outcomes?

1
How Can Accurate Weather Data Improve Your
Business Outcomes?
2
Introduction

• Global disasters have over doubled to around 400
  per year since 1970, a reality that today's
  data-driven CIO is aware of. As per the Business
  Continuity Institute (BCI), more than half of all
  firms are concerned about bad weather. Some
  publicly traded corporations still use "the
  weather excuse" to explain away weak financial
  outcomes during earnings calls.
• Despite all the concern about the negative impact
  weather has on your employees, operations, and
  facilities, the paradox is that weather is the
  most predictable hazard, growing more foreseeable
  each day as weather data analytics tools become
  ever more powerful and available.
• Understanding the impact of the weather on
  business performance
• Understanding quantifying the impact of weather
  data on revenue can lead to a variety of results,
  including

3

• Anticipate and Manage Demand Shifts Proactively
  anticipate manage shifts in product or service
  demand.
• Improve Pricing Promotion Knowing how weather
  can raise or reduce supply for your
  product/service enables you to more proactively
  adapt your strategy to take advantage of
  projected scenarios resulting from known
  forthcoming weather data conditions.
• Adjust business forecasts You can change and
  refine business projections and proactively
  manage stakeholders expectations by
  understanding how unexpected weather events can
  positively or negatively affect your
  organization.

4
1. Put quality over quantity when it comes
to weather data

• Access to high-quality weather data is essential
  for effective weather-based decision-making. So,
  what defines "good quality" weather data?
  Reliability, proximity, network size,
  granularity, and frequency are all factors. When
  a system receives enough erroneous weather data,
  quality falls. Some data sources, for example,
  rely upon community-based weather watchers, those
  who voluntarily collect weather data, and weather
  lovers of all kinds. While excitement for weather
  science is often a good thing, relying on
  crowdsourcing volunteer data to make key choices
  is dangerous, and network equipment issues can
  stifle data quality.
• Data closeness is also important findings can be
  distorted if you rely on systems that gather
  information from weather stations at airports and
  other remote sites. Because severe weather
  conditions can change widely from mile to mile or
  even block to block, it's critical to use
  hyper-local data for your location(s).
• When deciding what forms of hyper-local weather
  intelligence you require, consider network size,
  data granularity, and the regularity in which
  weather data is given. Inclement weather can
  quickly deteriorate, and organizations that rely
  on up-to-date routing paths can benefit from
  real-time data. Finally, CIOs should insist on an
  autonomous data quality check from any
  meteorological data services provider before
  making judgments based on the data.

5
2. Encourage decision-makers to work
together

• The usefulness of advanced weather to corporate
  leaders and business interruption professionals
  is decreased if such information cannot be
  rapidly and easily disseminated to all essential
  stakeholders.
• Your company must have the equipment and
  procedures to allow employees in the office and
  in the field to collaborate on information, from
  any location and on any device. Drivers on the
  road transporting your goods to the customer
  during a pop-up storm or an oil and gas firm
  requiring to route drones to assess storm damage
  to an offshore rig require access to weather
  data.
• Collaboration necessitates the capacity to reach
  consumers via portable devices using real-time
  weather notifications and the ability to
  collaborate on data visual maps.
  Decision-making comes to a halt when
  decision-makers do not share the same level of
  information.

6
3. Evaluate APIs

• APIs are giving CIOs in various industries new
  ways to add value to their goods and services,
  with weather data APIs everywhere. Using
  off-the-shelf APIs to integrate weather
  intelligence straight into current systems
  reduces data management headaches and enables
  fleet managers to efficiently deliver important
  information to the right individuals.
• Consider a company that manages vehicle fleets
  many fleet managers already use a monitoring site
  to disseminate to their field workers to assist
  them with routing decision-making. These
  systems may come preloaded with data like
  navigation maps and dynamic data like traffic
  congestions along their path, like what we see on
  Google Maps and Waze. Weather data can be coupled
  with other data sources, including such traffic
  patterns including road closures via APIs to
  automate those decisions to offer the best route
  to the driver, which eliminates delays, saves
  fuel, and keeps to agreed-upon delivery times.
• Learn more weather APIs at www.getambee.com.

7
4. Put your weather decision-making on
autopilot

• Weather forecasts assist organizations in
  planning for the future, but real-time weather
  data is required to automate and, as a result,
  speed up decisions made now. Automation
  guarantees that critical enterprise continuity
  decisions are no longer based on deciphering a
  plethora of meteorological data and making
  time-consuming and frequently wrong manual
  decisions but rather on letting the data guide
  the optimal course of action.
• Supply chain operations are a great place to
  start automating weather-related decisions to
  keep things flowing. Weather is simply one factor
  influencing the supply chain, regardless of the
  product or market. It is, however, a significant
  one. Advanced real-time weather data combined
  with thorough environmental forecasts can help
  firms with supply chains that are susceptible to
  weather interruptions figure out how much, where,
  and when to transport and stock product. Making
  the switch from a manual game of chance to
  data-driven management decisions can help you
  increase product sales while reducing weather
  risk.