How Can Accurate Weather Data Improve Your Business Outcomes?

1. How Can Accurate Weather Data Improve Your Business Outcomes?

2. Introduction • Global disasters have over doubled to around 400 per year since 1970, a reality that today's data-driven CIO is aware of. As per the Business Continuity Institute (BCI), more than half of all firms are concerned about bad weather. Some publicly traded corporations still use "the weather excuse" to explain away weak financial outcomes during earnings calls. • Despite all the concern about the negative impact weather has on your employees, operations, and facilities, the paradox is that weather is the most predictable hazard, growing more foreseeable each day as weather data analytics tools become ever more powerful and available. • Understanding the impact of the weather on business performance • Understanding & quantifying the impact of weather data on revenue can lead to a variety of results, including:

3. Anticipate and Manage Demand Shifts: Proactively anticipate & manage shifts in product or service demand. • Improve Pricing & Promotion: Knowing how weather can raise or reduce supply for your product/service enables you to more proactively adapt your strategy to take advantage of projected scenarios resulting from known forthcoming weather data conditions. • Adjust business forecasts: You can change and refine business projections and proactively manage stakeholders’ expectations by understanding how unexpected weather events can positively or negatively affect your organization.

4. 1. Put quality over quantity when it comes to weather data • Access to high-quality weather data is essential for effective weather-based decision-making. So, what defines "good quality" weather data? Reliability, proximity, network size, granularity, and frequency are all factors. When a system receives enough erroneous weather data, quality falls. Some data sources, for example, rely upon community-based weather watchers, those who voluntarily collect weather data, and weather lovers of all kinds. While excitement for weather science is often a good thing, relying on crowdsourcing volunteer data to make key choices is dangerous, and network equipment issues can stifle data quality. • Data closeness is also important: findings can be distorted if you rely on systems that gather information from weather stations at airports and other remote sites. Because severe weather conditions can change widely from mile to mile or even block to block, it's critical to use hyper-local data for your location(s). • When deciding what forms of hyper-local weather intelligence you require, consider network size, data granularity, and the regularity in which weather data is given. Inclement weather can quickly deteriorate, and organizations that rely on up-to-date routing paths can benefit from real-time data. Finally, CIOs should insist on an autonomous data quality check from any meteorological data services provider before making judgments based on the data.

5. 2. Encourage decision-makers to work together • The usefulness of advanced weather to corporate leaders and business interruption professionals is decreased if such information cannot be rapidly and easily disseminated to all essential stakeholders. • Your company must have the equipment and procedures to allow employees in the office and in the field to collaborate on information, from any location and on any device. Drivers on the road transporting your goods to the customer during a pop-up storm or an oil and gas firm requiring to route drones to assess storm damage to an offshore rig require access to weather data. • Collaboration necessitates the capacity to reach consumers via portable devices using real-time weather notifications and the ability to collaborate on data & visual maps. Decision-making comes to a halt when decision-makers do not share the same level of information.

6. 3. Evaluate APIs • APIs are giving CIOs in various industries new ways to add value to their goods and services, with weather data APIs everywhere. Using off-the-shelf APIs to integrate weather intelligence straight into current systems reduces data management headaches and enables fleet managers to efficiently deliver important information to the right individuals. • Consider a company that manages vehicle fleets: many fleet managers already use a monitoring site to disseminate to their field workers to assist them with routing & decision-making. These systems may come preloaded with data like navigation maps and dynamic data like traffic congestions along their path, like what we see on Google Maps and Waze. Weather data can be coupled with other data sources, including such traffic patterns including road closures via APIs to automate those decisions to offer the best route to the driver, which eliminates delays, saves fuel, and keeps to agreed-upon delivery times. • Learn more weather APIs at www.getambee.com.

7. 4. Put your weather decision-making on autopilot • Weather forecasts assist organizations in planning for the future, but real-time weather data is required to automate and, as a result, speed up decisions made now. Automation guarantees that critical enterprise continuity decisions are no longer based on deciphering a plethora of meteorological data and making time-consuming and frequently wrong manual decisions but rather on letting the data guide the optimal course of action. • Supply chain operations are a great place to start automating weather-related decisions to keep things flowing. Weather is simply one factor influencing the supply chain, regardless of the product or market. It is, however, a significant one. Advanced real-time weather data combined with thorough environmental forecasts can help firms with supply chains that are susceptible to weather interruptions figure out how much, where, and when to transport and stock product. Making the switch from a manual game of chance to data-driven management decisions can help you increase product sales while reducing weather risk.