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Case Study

Vopak

Vopak partners with data.world to improve efficiency and enhance safety for its tank storage business.

Vopak is an independent tank storage company that invests in new technologies that help achieve its purpose: storing vital products with care.

Vopak wanted to have a more clear understanding of and access to their data assets and associated metadata. They saw a data catalog as an effective pathway towards improving internal processes and unveiling relevant business insights.

Roel Pot is the data architect who leads the catalog initiative for Vopak.

“We’re improving our processes to become more efficient and to work more safe, and we believe that data and analytics can help us in a great way. But the next questions are, what data do I have? And where can I find it? And who is actually the person that I can go to if I have questions about the data?”

The Challenge

Vopak wanted to accelerate and broaden the understanding of data and metadata without unproductive manual steps.

Data virtualization: Vopak’s data engineers and data modelers struggled to connect all the different source systems, independently of where they live or how well-maintained the systems are.
Data discovery: Vopak’s data analysts needed a more efficient method to find and trust the data they needed to perform meaningful analysis.

An initial use case on energy consumption and reducing the company’s carbon footprint required bringing together a lot of different data sources and knowledge. This included sensor measurements, external weather data, along with information from Vopak’s operational systems.

“That means that you have to figure out a lot, how to connect with the different source systems and how to set up the glossary, and etc. The really the benefits of both accessing the data as well as the description of the data together is that you don’t want to go to one tool for finding out what data we have and then to another tool after they’ve been linked correctly. I think that is still very difficult to do”

Roel Pot Data Architect, Vopak

The Solution

Vopak uses data.world catalog to gather all the information from sensor measurements and external weather data to accelerate energy consumption analyses. Vopak technical teams can easily manage all the data sources, making all the relevant data available to their data modelers and analysts. This approach has helped Vopak answer their initial business questions: saving energy, reducing the CO2 footprint, and optimizing energy-related costs.

“We found both solutions in one product. data.world, as a data catalog, enables both describing your data as well as accessing your data.”

“data.world is part of the glue that gets data to work for Vopak.”

Roel Pot Data Architect, Vopak