During a recent visit to a newly-built oil refinery in Asia, I was struck by the large quantity of data collected, which the operators and engineers were then asked to review. Unfortunately, they ended up with mountains of paper which actually didn’t tell them very much, let alone what they could do to boost the refinery’s performance, which evidently is the point of collecting all these data.

The refinery management had the same problem – Plenty of data but they have no idea what to do with it. Continue reading…