Next level analytics cloud data platform – Covid-19 use case

Even though the number of corona infections is decreasing drastically in most countries around the globe, the pandemic has shown us how fast companies have to adapt and adjust their working habits, team structures, and business models. Meanwhile, obtaining a better understanding of the impact of corona, has been and continues to be a key point. In fact, its causes tend to be a significant risk for supply chains and several business models. Nonetheless, most of the corona track solutions tend to lack data quality which restricts the informative value provided. The architectures behind it are usually complex. They are mostly not even semi-automatically operated but rather related to a lot of manual work. Regarding this particular aspect we would like to show you how to solve an ad hoc analytical need with the newest technology using the Covid-19 crises as an example. The first blog will provide an overview of the key analysis questions and how we solved them within our Covid-19 Tracker while the second blog will deep dive into the technological part.

Based on the experiences of the last few months, the following key areas can be identified to keep track of the current Covid-19 situation within a company.

Violation Tracking 

Covid leads to the need of keeping teams at a distance and seperate them frome one another physically, hence limiting the amount of time employees work together in the same office. Even though most employees understand the necessity of such relegations and follow them, there might still be a few who do not take them as serious as required. To ensure the safety off all employees, violation tracking, offers the possibility to identify and advise these people. Furthermore, it provides a tool for the management to control the effectiveness of their covid concepts as well as offices which used to be crowded.

Contact Tracking 

Since the KPI # of contact persons highly correlated with an increasing infection rate in the past, managers should understand the latest trends and adjust their covid strategy accordingly. A prevalent action to decrease the number of contacts were home office policies. However, despite the opportunity to work from home, too many employees still preferred to work in the office which probably led to a massive growth in infections.

Impact of corona Infection 

Even though authorities and companies developed various concepts to limit infections, the spread among further employees after an initial positive case was observed frequently. In order to keep the remaining team or rather entire whole company safe, it was necessary to Identify potentially infectious employees as early as possible and take appropriate action, such as demanding employees to isolate themselves in quarantine. Especially, the potential infection time and location provides valuable information for the health department.

 

Based on the mentioned key areas, we were looking for an architecture that would solve our needs of an easy and quick set up architecture with high flexibility. With the combination of tableau and snowflake we found the matching architecture that let us solve all questions which had been introduced in the previous section in a short period of time.

Starting with the landing page of our solution, the user gets an overview of the two leading KPIs: Number of potential infected employees (an employee that had contact with an infected person for at least 20 minutes) and the number of violations (number of times the office capacity limit was reached).

Having a shocking number of 11 potential Infections, the need to take action is high.

 

 

Using the infection tracking page, the user can walk through the timeline of the selected day and use the animated office app to understand how, when, and where employees could have been infected. The risk of an infection is highlighted using colors from red to green. In order to understand the location of the infected employee, his or her movement path throughout the day can be shown. However clicking through the entire timeline to detect potential infections can be highly inefficient and raises the need of the table at the bottom right. All potential infections are listed and act as a bookmark to the infection point. In addition, it is possible to send an E-Mail to the affected employees to inform them about the potential risk while advising them to quarantine. The three sections in the top show the number of contacts and the office / home office ratio as well as trends in comparison to previous weeks. A top five ranking helps to identify the most sociable employees.

 

 

Whenever all necessary decisions regarding potentially infected employees are mde, the violation tracking page can help prevent future infections by identifying violations of the current covid 19 strategies. Using the same structure as the infection tracking page the violation tracking page explains the trends of the latest violations in terms of exceeding room capacity. In addition, managers can understand leading rooms and employees that are part of a violation and restructure their teams or adapt their covid strategy to decrease violations in the future.  An animated office map at the bottom left offers a detailed analysis highlighting violations of the room capacity in red. As already known from the infection tracking, the table of the bottom right provides bookmarks to jump to the violation point and increase the efficiency of the detailed analyses.

 

As we have seen during the covid 19 pandemic having a clear data driven strategy is crucial and will make the difference between leading and losing business models. Feel free to contact us regarding any questions about potential business opportunities of a modern data platform and the integration with your current architecture. 

Contact Person

Oliver Ossenbrink

Management of sales and HR

 Dr. Ulrich Meseth
Senior Consultant