With our origins in Shrewsbury, UK, it could be said that our passion for the evolution of data driven solutions is due to living in the town that is the birthplace of Charles Darwin.   Truth be told, our passion for data has evolved over 20 years where we have learned how to combine data with domain experience to help companies solve business problems and pursue operational certainty.  

Our journey with data started in the late 90s with distributed control systems (DCS) and implementations where plant data was kept within the control rooms.  Back then, operational and business systems were a collection of siloed systems and databases and engineers spent a lot of time trying to download and wrangle data in spreadsheets with VBA code to perform even simple analysis.  The data landscape did not lend itself to real-time decision support or automated analytics based on integrated data sets.  Indeed, the siloed functional systems added to the cross departmental barriers where it often seemed that data ownership was prioritised over the greater good of the business, somewhat akin to a Game of Thrones where people fight over data and information territory.

In the early 2000’s the advent of Plant Historians, such as the PI System,  and Operational Intelligence systems, such as Siemens XHQ, enabled organisations to break down those traditional barriers and integrate those disparate data sets.  The integrated data could then be modelled and contextualised, enabling data driven visualisations that contained content specified by the end users to address critical information needs.  The consultants at Stiperstone Analytics pioneered plant and enterprise wide operational intelligence solutions and many of those solutions are still being used to this day.