Empowering engineers to become citizen data scientists
Why we invested in Visplore
The shortage of trained data scientists has been a significant challenge for most industrial firms in the DACH region. In IT alone there were 86,000 unfilled positions at the end of 2020 in Germany, according to BITKOM. Approximately 7,000 of these open positions were related to data science.[1] This labor shortage is one of the key reasons that led to the rise of citizen data scientists over the last years. A citizen data scientist is a term coined by Gartner and defined “as a person who creates or generates models that use advanced diagnostic analytics or predictive and prescriptive capabilities, but whose primary job function is outside the field of statistics and analytics.”[2] In short: engineers that turn into data scientists!
A growing number of tools such as low-code and no-code platforms is available for citizen data scientists. Those platforms enable users with limited coding skills to utilize software and implement processes that initially were exclusively used by people with coding or data science skills. The rise of citizen data scientists does not replace coding experts, but rater complements them with their unique expertise in specific fields such as engineering or maintenance in manufacturing. And Visplore’s software has been designed to be used by this customer segment.
Visplore is a Vienna-based software company that developed a high-performance data exploration and visual analytics suite. The software allows for intuitive analytics of large measurement and simulation data. In Visplore, working with data is also much more interactive and dynamic than in classical statistics software, business intelligence tools or Excel. This enables engineers and experts in process technology, quality assurance or maintenance to efficiently perform analyses of machine data and other IoT sources on their own, which had previously been done by trained data scientists.
Visplore as a company was just founded half a year ago, but the software is already feature rich and mature, because it builds upon a decade of award-winning research and development at VRVis — Austria’s leading research institute in the field of visual computing. The software was jointly developed with well-known industrial corporates such as AVL List, Austrian Power Grid, RHI Magnesita and others.
By implementing their corporate partners’ feedback, the Visplore team was very aware of the corporates’ daily challenges and thus steadily improved the user experience and interface. As a consequence, the product entails easy integration of widespread external data sources and tools such as various SQL data bases, OSISoft Pi, Python, Matlab or R, among others. The software Visplore offers interactive pre-set analytics dashboards for correlation analysis, pattern search, root-cause analysis, and many other types of analyses. So a user can actually start to explore and analyze a massive, dirty dataset within minutes and without the need of any coding or cumbersome configuration — which would generally take hours with other existing tools. So, Visplore actually leverages a no-code approach for visual data analytics. To convince yourself, you can download a free version of the software suite on the company’s website.
Industrial customers use the software for data exploration and analytics across all kind of industries. Use case examples are process optimization by comparing assets or product conditions, product quality analytics in discrete manufacturing processes, drifts in continuous processes, load profile analyses and forecast optimization in energy or utilities. Generally speaking, the ever-growing number of sensors and connectivity provides data that needs to be explored and understood in the first place. Once explored and understood, industrial processes can be optimized, as was the case in a large foundry complex for instance, where by using Visplore new dependencies among variables were detected and as a result, the heat energy was reduced by around 5% and mold wear by around 4%.
Furthermore, preparing data for machine learning models requires annotation and labelling of the data. In Visplore it is possible to clean and label big data interactively and tightly integrated with data visualization and analysis. Visplore enables to analyze even uncleaned data and helps to intuitively identify patterns in raw data sets that would leave common business intelligence tools frozen.
btov Partners Industrial Tech Fund is very happy to lead the seed round at Visplore and join the firm’s founders Harald Piringer and Thomas Muehlbacher on their journey to become the leading visual analytics platform for engineers. What Tableau is for business users, we hope Visplore will become for engineers.
More in-depth information can be found on Visplore’s Youtube Channel and website.
[1] https://www.bitkom.org/Presse/Presseinformation/86000-offene-Stellen-fuer-IT-Fachkraefte
[2] https://blogs.gartner.com/carlie-idoine/2018/05/13/citizen-data-scientists-and-why-they-matter/
