PERC Data Management

The Challenge: How to solve the propane industry’s data management and mining dilemma?

Inundated with more than four million rows of industry data, the Propane Education & Research Council (PERC) partnered with Hahn Agency to create a new system for data cataloguing, mining, reporting and data visualization.

With PERC’s data living in various formats and in numerous places throughout the organization – from desktops to Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehouse, and Excel files to CSV formats – the Hahn team first struck out to find the right data strategy and the right community for PERC to make the wholesale cultural shift for creating a new repository for their data, and to also fulfill an executive mandate to be able to model their data and democratize PERC’s data globally.

 

Following Hahn’s data-research planning model and McKinsey 7S model for organizational effectiveness, the data challenges for each of PERC’s five business units including Safety & Training, Business Development, Industry Relations, Marketing, and Finance were defined and shaped into new data intelligence business requirements.

The Solution: A new data community home, new data personas, metadata modeling, stewardship, and insightful data visualization. Phew.

Our combined Hahn Agency and PERC superpowers team is referred to as DataOps – an advanced team of marketing and research operations experts, senior data analysts, programmers, and creative strategists.

To meet PERC’s data business requirements, the DataOps team first identified data.world as the new data community for eating, sleeping, and drinking data. data.world is a Public Benefit Corporation and Certified B Corporation and is the world’s largest open data community. In taking this step, all of the old ways of managing data at PERC have been thrown out by committing to new leadership personas, ongoing metadata modeling and currency standards, and entirely new ways of handling and processing data.

 

Second, working hand in hand with data.world, the DataOps team is delivering a human-centric, automated process of managing data to uncover mission-critical insights more quickly for the propane industry to win on everything from setting industry safety standards to protecting customer access to propane products, to presenting new relevant CO2 emissions data on propane’s role in decarbonization, along with industry marketing performance intelligence to know which strategies are meeting performance KPIs and which are not.

The Results: Clear, fast and accurate answers to propane industry questions.

Through this joint DataOps team, PERC now has the ability to:

  • Access all PERC data (proprietary or purchased) through one repository
  • Generate reports, visuals and project briefs
  • Link disparate data sources through subscribed platforms including Tableau, Snowflake, Fluxx and other data management platforms