Organisations are investing heavily in predictive analytics. Predictive analytics combines data mining, automated algorithms, and studying historical data to make predictions about the future. Businesses invest a lot in getting the right skills and resources to build just the right models. While working and building one model is tough, building predictive models at scale for a multi-billion company is an uphill battle.However, Vedanta seems to have it all figured out. The company started working on its data back in 2016, built the data lake in 2019, working with a few predictive models is now setting itself upon another journey of building predictive models at scale for the whole group of companies.
“We are planning to democratize the process of building predictive models. So if we have, for example, 5 predictive models across the Vedanta group today. Can we democratize that and have almost 200 predictive models built by different users? Our initial nudge ways to ask ourselves ‘can we have our business users trained in low code- no code platforms so they can build the predictive model themselves’. Since they are the ones who understand the data and the business domain, what if we enable them with the platform can they build the predictive model themselves?” said Anand Laxshmivarahan, Chief Digital Officer at Vedanta Resources.
In the last 9 months, Vedanta has brought in BCG as the group’s digital partner. Along with them, Vedanta has charted three pillars to work on.
- The first is to create the roadmap of initiates. Going to each and every business, understanding what the pain points are, and marrying them to the digital solution.
- The second is having the right people and the right organization designed for these initiatives to work.
- The third is to build the right capabilities. Vedanta has created a digital academy within and has segmented it into three parts. Its main objective is to upskill and re-skill the employees for future developments in the data domain.
“The first segment is the top 100 leaders within the company who need to understand, embrace digital and data and understand the difference between what’s real and hype in technology. We run masterclasses for these top 100 people. The next segment is of 200-250 people who are going through a 16 weeks data science program. This project and training have been designed in such a way that they will learn and deliver within the Vedanta group itself,” Laxshmivarahan explained.
Laxshmivarahan believes that every employee and partner needs to adapt to digital technologies. For this, the Vedanta group has partnered with NASSCOM to bring in the future skills program.
“We have created a learning path within the future skill program for our employees which is launched Vedanta wide. I believe that the segment of 200-250 who are getting trained in data sciences are the ones who are going to help us democratize it. And these are not the people from the digital and IT teams, they are from operations, maintenance, geoscientists, and communications teams. These are the people who understand data within their domain but now are trying to get cross-skilled in data science on this platform,” he concluded.
