With support from a three-year grant, Kelley School Assistant Professor of Operations Management Amrou Awaysheh is leveraging big data to help manufacturers across the globe save energy and money.
The grant from APICS, the association for supply chain management, allows Awaysheh to work with a Fortune 200 firm to consider various sustainability practices that drive improvements in manufacturing performance.
The firm, which is unnamed, is capturing data from meters on manufacturing lines in their plants. Awaysheh is analyzing that data to understand its value for driving better decision making at various levels of the organization—one of the hallmarks of how researchers at the Kelley School on the IUPUI campus are driving economic access and prosperity in Indiana and beyond.
“Big data holds the potential to unlock answers to questions about sustainability and manufacturing practices,” said Awaysheh. “While there are many questions that can be answered by this data, the possibilities are truly endless. The sheer amount of data available will allow us to answer questions we don’t even know how to ask yet.”
“Think about the large amount of data that exists in an organization. Sometimes, organizations know what they have; sometimes, they don’t. When I work with a company, I tell people to think about it like an iceberg. A company may know the tip of the iceberg, but they don’t know what lies beneath the water. That’s what this grant is getting at – helping companies understand what data they have and what they can do with that data to drive change.”