The principle of BPI has created a decision support system dedicated to helping mid-sized businesses in food, agriculture and renewable energy accomplish break through business performance improvement. Over the past 15 years we have been improving the service offering of the Ethanol Performance Improvement Group (EPIG) service and technology platform. Through the work with the directors of the EPIG group we have created an information platform that helps companies benchmark against peers, aggregates data from across the organizations and give company staff an analysis tool to look at trends in key company performance indicators. The web portal platform is leverageable or scalable in ethanol, as well as other renewable energy industries, food and agriculture.

The technology platform is a combination of data collection from across the organization coupled with the High Performance Indicators web portal that serves as a benchmarking, analysis and decision support tool for the business. 

• Company data sources have a single point of ownership (updating and quality). Data sources are typically from the accounting system, Excel, desktop database, manufacturing info systems (OSI Pie & DataParc), other systems like lab data system.
• Company data is pushed from the company’s network to a Microsoft Azure Cloud SQL Database through a secure system that isolates access to other companies’ data (company data collection firewall).
• The data transformation framework is setup so it can be managed by each company’s data source owner. By owner I mean that different staff in the company are accountable for specific data. This is a data quality critical success factor.
• I have implemented new statistical and data quality checks for each company data source owner. This fixes data at the source: when it is updated and before it gets into the system.
• The next evolution will seek to transition the system to more server-side processing and include additional integrated hooks to a broader set of applications that supply data.

 The scalable and leverageable Benchmarking and Decision Support web portal expand access within the ethanol industry and beyond. In addition to the Ethanol companies, the web portal will be accessible to other industries and generate material value at significantly lower cost than they can do themselves. The service offers a focused area of resources for creating a decision support system (that aggregates data from all areas of the business including accounting, finance, operations, lab, maintenance, environment and safety), and an analytical tool that can be used by employees from all areas of the business.