Rather than a data warehouse, which is built to spec and then filled in an orderly fashion, WCM keynote speaker Richard Vermillion wants to fill a “data lake” with information and then figure out how it might be useful. For warranty and service contract industry professionals, this will allow new sources of data to help analysts predict what happens to products in the field, and how and why they fail.
The promise of emerging concepts such as Big Data and the Internet of Things is to make it easier to understand why things happen and how they happen. For warranty professionals, the dream is to be able to predict the patterns and circumstances surrounding product failures, and preventing them from happening again.
At the Warranty Chain Management Conference next week, the second of two back-to-back keynote presentations is going to take a deep dive into the topic. Richard Vermillion, the CEO of the leading warranty data analytics company After Inc., plans to deliver a speech on the subject of, “The Warranty Data Lake: How Big Data and Data Science Can Drive Program Improvements.”
Why a data lake, as opposed to a data warehouse or an even plainer-sounding database? Vermillion admitted that the term “data lake” has become a bit of a buzzword, not unlike “big data” itself has. But he said that while “big data” is all about the three V’s (volume, velocity, and variety), data lakes are more specifically distinguished by the variety of data that they can hold. And that has tremendous benefits when it comes to warranty data, where what you’re looking for isn’t always immediately clear.