Case Studies

Network Rail CDO

Network Rail own, operate and develop Britain’s railway infrastructure. That’s 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts, and the thousands of signals, level crossings, and stations. They also run 20 of the UK’s largest stations.

As a business they identified information as one of their most significant corporate risks and had recently appointed a Chief Data Officer (CDO) to meet this challenge. Whilst the CDO was senior in status, she required a supporting team and infrastructure to assist the new role.

UK Power Networks Improving Data Governance and Data Management

UK Power Networks (UKPN) had the ambition to become a truly data-centric utility where data was treated as an essential business asset. While many in the business acknowledged the importance of data, there was no consistent view of how to create a true data culture.

Improving data governance and data management would provide a way for the organisation to understand and manage business risk, unlocking the value in data assets and enabling innovation.

Yorkshire Water Bio-Waste Modelling

A core component of water management is the treatment of wastewater and its by-products, colloquially known as sludge. To do this effectively, the Yorkshire Water wastewater team required a bio-waste water solution that could distil a complex network of sites and production data into a minimum cost treatment schedule, allowing them to plan the sludge management process more efficiently.

Alongside this, the end-users wanted a solution that they could ‘tweak’ and re-run, either to incorporate recent site changes/impacts or plan for potential operational scenarios. And at the same time, Yorkshire Water wanted to achieve an outcome with minimal OPEX expenditure.

Business intelligence reporting and intelligent forecasting for Network Rail

In recent years, Network Rail has been impacted by significant organisational, digital and cultural change.

Growing demands for greater efficiency and effectiveness have resulted in a need for more intelligent reporting and decision analytics, especially within Network Rail’s Regional Capital Delivery teams.

Adopting a devolution strategy required Network Rail to ensure that each region had the business intelligence and intelligent forecasting capabilities necessary to deliver major capital projects that gave outstanding value to the taxpayer whilst meeting stringent government guidelines.

Executing a Data Strategy for Yorkshire Water

Yorkshire Water faces similar pressures and demands as many other utilities, and has long realised that data is a core asset in helping them to deliver smarter network and customer operations.

This need to utilise their data assets to help exploit and capitalise their physical assets led them to undertake a complex, multiyear data transformation. This case study explains the vital delivery role provided by The Oakland Group in executing a data strategy across a broad set of areas within the data transformation initiative.

Creating a data platform for a major UK media organisation

Subscriber growing pains The media company had struggled to increase its subscriber base within its digital products group and was losing out on advertising revenue to competing products and formats. This demand for growth and competitive advantage created urgency and an aggressive timeline for the business to develop and deploy new capabilities. Central to the…

Evolving next generation analytics capabilities with Parcel2Go

The starting point – ‘where are we?’ By modern standards, Parcel2Go had already achieved a great deal but was still keen to build on its foundation of past success and look to the future. Parcel2Go invited Oakland to help chart their next phase of data-driven growth, starting with a comprehensive ‘Data Capability Assessment’ and data…