It&#8217;s no secret that the oil and gas industry is a complex and high-stakes business. The industry&#8217;s reliance on a tools that was never meant to manage such complexity, however, is a dirty little secret that&#8217;s holding many organizations back. After numerous conversations with execs of this industry, we were very surprised to find out that tools like Excel, are frequently used as a catch-all solution for workflow optimization. But what if we told you that using spreadsheet tools is not only insufficient for the task but can actually hinder your business&#8217;s efficiency and profitability? In this article, we&#8217;ll dive into the five key reasons why we think Excel is not suitable for workflow optimization in the oil and gas industry and offer options on how to move forward in the future.
1.Lack of scalability and adaptability
The oil and gas industry involves a staggering amount of data. As projects grow, so do the number of variables, stakeholders, and workflows. Excel simply wasn&#8217;t designed to handle this level of complexity. As the number of sheets and formulas increase, so does the risk of errors, which can lead to costly mistakes.
Solution to this one is actually quite simple. Adopt a dedicated project management software that is specifically designed specifically for the oil and gas industry. Such tools offer better scalability, adaptability, and the ability to handle complex data structures with ease. Yes, I know, making the switch from Excel can be scary, in the end, it has been working well for you the last 30 years or so. Well, while you might be a high performing, gold medal athlete in spreadsheets, but junior members of your operations might not. And this is likely to be the trend with young people entering the workforce. When these team members start collaborating on projects, you want to make sure they are using a tool they are confident with.
2.Inefficient collaboration
In an industry where teamwork and communication are vital, limitations in real-time collaboration can be a significant hindrance. Sharing files and waiting for updates from colleagues not only slows down the decision-making process but can also lead to version control issues and data inconsistencies. One unregistered miss click by one worker can bring a world of headaches for countless others somewhere down the line.
Moreover, some data is simply not vital for all the team members to have. Opening a huge spreadsheet of data every day and attempting to find a relevant datapoint that prompts you to action, is just not the best way how to start your shift.
What can you do? Utilize cloud-based collaboration tools that enable real-time updates, version control, and data consistency. These platforms make it easier for teams to work together, regardless of their location, and ensure everyone is working with the most up-to-date information.
3.Lack of data integrity and security
Tools that are not designed specifically for workflow optimization lack the robust security features that the oil and gas industry requires, leaving sensitive data vulnerable to unauthorized access and modification. In addition, your spreadsheet files can easily become corrupted, putting your critical data at risk.
That’s where data management system comes in. It provides secure access control, encryption, and robust backup and recovery options. A dedicated system that ensures your data is protected and available when you need it.
4.Limited analytics capabilities
To make informed decisions, the oil and gas industry relies on advanced analytics and modelling techniques. Basic analytical tools and visualization capabilities fall short in this regard, and its limitations can lead to oversimplified models that don&#8217;t accurately represent the complexities of the industry.
We have come a long way when it comes to analytics in oil &amp; gas. Each year, numerous new clever tools that offer advanced data analysis, modelling, and visualization features pop up. What is important is whether you can implement them into your current software stack &#8211; enabling you to make better-informed decisions based on accurate and comprehensive insights.
5.Time-consuming manual processes
This is a big one. Despite the automation capabilities of Excel, it often still requires manual data entry and manipulation, leading to an increased risk of human error. In a high-stakes industry like oil and gas, these errors can become extremely costly.
Embrace automation by implementing tools and software designed to streamline and automate data entry, analysis, and reporting processes. This reduces the risk of human error and allows your team to focus on more strategic tasks.
In conclusion, it&#8217;s time for the oil and gas industry to move beyond spreadsheets and embrace modern, specialized tools and software designed to address the unique challenges of this sector. By doing so, you&#8217;ll optimize your workflows, improve collaboration, enhance data security and integrity, and ultimately make better, data-driven decisions that drive your business forward.
There are Excel alternatives to workflow optimization. Don&#8217;t let the dirty little secret of spreadsheets hold you back any longer.
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If you are ready to get rid of spreadsheets, do not hesitate to contact us <a href="https://www.cuurios.com/contact#book-a-demo">here.</a>
Read more on digital transformation <a href="https://www.cuurios.com/blog/digital-transformation-the-monster-under-the-bed">here.</a>

The Dirty Little Secret of Oil & Gas: How Spreadsheets Are Holding The Industry Back

Have you ever wondered how growing up in a certain place shapes your personality and career choices?
My favorite memories of growing up in the warm and hospitable region of Puglia in southern Italy, are the summers spent by the sea. There was something about the warm sun, the salty breeze, and the friendly people that made every day seem like there was a new adventure to discover out there. I would spend my days exploring the coastline, swimming in the crystal-clear waters, and pretty much doing any activity one could imagine when thinking about the sea.
One summer, I worked in a small family-owned restaurant near the beach. They welcomed me in as if I were one of their own, and soon I was helping out in the kitchen and chatting with customers. I learned the art of making people feel at home and at ease, a skill that has stayed with me throughout my life.
Years later, during my university studies, I worked as a bartender to support myself. The skills I had learned during those summer vacations came in handy as I interacted with customers and made sure they felt comfortable and valued. I would remember details about their preferences, such as their favorite music and drink, and use that knowledge to make their experience special.
It was during this time that I realized my passion for connecting with people and making them feel comfortable. I loved building relationships and creating a welcoming atmosphere, but I knew there was something more out there for me. After university, I moved to the Netherlands and began my career. Sales was my calling. I loved the fast-paced environment and the opportunity to connect with many different people, listening to their experiences and making them my own. But it wasn&#8217;t until my previous job that I rediscovered my passion for technology. I started writing small codes in Excel VBA to simplify workflows and optimize processes, and I was amazed by the results. The process of thinking through a challenge, translating it into instructions and codes, and seeing the results was incredibly satisfying.
When I discovered Cuurios, I knew it was the perfect fit for me. At Cuurios, I&#8217;m able to combine my commercial spirit with my interest in technology, and I feel like an important part of the team. The company culture is one of openness, collaboration, and inclusivity, and I&#8217;m proud to be part of the team.
Looking back, I realize that my upbringing in southern Italy and my experiences working in hospitality helped me boost my career in sales and have shaped who I am today. I am grateful for those experiences and for the opportunity to continue to learn and grow at Cuurios.

What shapes an Account Manager in tech? – Meet Marco

I belong to Odisha, a state in the eastern part of India. Since I was a kid I always loved to travel and explore. My prospective towards meeting new people, discovering new places made me a traveller by passion.
I like to build different structures using small things like paper, woodblock etc. That’s why I choose Civil Engineering to be part of construction world but after getting a corporate job at MNC, I developed interest in building web application and I realised this is what I should do.
I started as full stack developer at first, but I choose to be a frontend developer because it gives me satisfaction when I can showcase my idea into a result which can be understood by even a non technical person.
Working at multiple companies with domains like mining, networking, supply-chain, ed-tech broadened my knowledge about how powerful software development can be. It encourages me to explore different areas beyond my comfort zone.
The year 2020 was a difficult year for all of us and it made me realise how important it is to have a work-life balance and healthy mental state. I like being structured and organised, so I prioritise my activities based on time and complexity level.
I am very passionate and dedicated towards my work. It gives me satisfaction at the end of the day when I am productive enough towards my job.
<h3>My Cuurios Story</h3>
After moving to The Netherlands in 2021, I looked for opportunities in software development. I found Cuurios as one of my ideal work place, being a well organised growing start up holding diverse culture and ability to grow together. I had a very nice experience throughout the interview process and with a warm welcome, I joined Cuurios as a Frontend Developer in July 2021.
We have a certain way of working at Cuurios. We brainstorm the requirement with attention to detail, find the optimal way of implementation and then work upon it. Sometimes researching takes more time but helps us building a better result in future. We always gain from those experiences even if we do not succeed.
I am confident while taking responsibilities and delivering on time. We try to be a cross functional team, learn new techniques in guild meetings and most importantly I can balance my work and life very easily. I feel comfortable while expressing my opinions and get feedback from my colleagues. I get various opportunities to improve my personal skills.
In the end, I feel happy about being who I am.

“We always gain from those experiences even if we do not succeed” – Meet Adyasha

At the beginning of June Cuurios won the start-up competition at the “Go Digital Energy” event, held in Amsterdam and organized by Globuc. The event focused on digitalisation practices, digitally-enabled holistic programmes and specific solutions (from data tools to AI, Cloud, Digital twins). During this experience, we got the perfect opportunity to take the floor and present our vision.
&#8220;Big Data is a hype! Far too many companies are drowning in data in their attempt to collect (and store) as much information as possible. So, dashboards come to the rescue offering well designed interfaces that offer have no other use than representing data in a different way. They are not a solution because dashboards only analyze and present data. They can’t tell you what to do next.&#8221;
Despite all technologically advanced possibilities presented during the conference (or any other industry event you would attend these days&#8230;), Cuurios does not set its focus on data and technology, our ultimate goal is to enable us, human beings, to be able to make better decisions!
Exactly this was our motivation and true drive to allow organizations to keep track of these decisions and develop a data driven action management solution, designed for asset rich environments and customizable to your unique workflow. Does that sound boring? Well, you are actually right… In the midst of all these technological advanced things (AI/ML, Digital twins, Blockchain, Metaverse, etc.), we love to make things simple :-)!
However, we’ve proven to provide teams with the right solution to streamline their activities in a very intuitive way allowing them to focus on what really matters.
The jury (with members representing Equinor, Saudi Aramco, Wintershall DEA, Schneider Electric and BP) awarded Cuurios “for their creativity, potential growth and solution scalability by unanimous decision” (Fayez Kharbat, Saudi Aramco).
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-667" src="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/07/Globuc-429-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="750" height="500" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/07/Globuc-429-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/07/Globuc-429-300x200.jpg 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/07/Globuc-429-768x512.jpg 768w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/07/Globuc-429-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/07/Globuc-429-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />
Picture credits: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mari-abramkina-038842a1/" data-attribute-index="11" data-entity-hovercard-id="urn:li:fs_miniProfile:ACoAABWowawBziYYmcG-GSmkXQlGD1PbH1oa5Lo" data-entity-type="MINI_PROFILE">Mari Abramkina</a>
We are incredibly proud of this recognition!
If it’s true that a good beginning bodes well, then we’ve never been more excited to see what else is yet to come!
Stay tuned! Stay Cuurios!

Cuurios wins the start-up competition at the Go Digital Energy conference

At Cuurios, we’ve lately been working on our brand story and brand identity. We think it’s important that the way we represent ourselves properly reflects our vison and mission, our company culture,  and what we believe in general.
What we believe is that the  Big Data hype is exactly what is says it is: a hype. It’s main premise &#8211; the more data you’re collecting the better &#8211; results in corporations drowning in data. To put it bluntly: the more you know, the more you realize you don&#8217;t know and the less confident you are to act, as depicted in this graph:
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-317" src="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/Cuurios-1-Graph-1024x576.png" alt="" width="700" height="394" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/Cuurios-1-Graph-1024x576.png 1024w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/Cuurios-1-Graph-300x169.png 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/Cuurios-1-Graph-768x432.png 768w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/Cuurios-1-Graph-1536x864.png 1536w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/Cuurios-1-Graph-2048x1152.png 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" />
Nevertheless, we do believe that data can be extremely valuable. But: we found out that data shouldn’t be put centre stage if you want to improve your business. You need to start curiously studying your workflows first, and then look for relevant data that is insightful and helpful in improving these workflows and, in the end, your overall operations. That’s where the true value of data is to be found.
At Cuurios, we offer a software platform that optimizes workflows, for asset rich businesses specifically. Fuelled by our trademark curiosity we delve into your company and your specific machinery and processes, resulting in a thorough understanding of your way of working. We then use that knowledge to unlock your data and configure our workflow optimization software to your unique situation.
Our platform seamlessly connects your people, machinery and actions with data, leading to more efficient operations. Clients tell us that implementing our software feels like their data-congested brain finally gets the much-needed neurological wiring that prompts action.
Finally, you understand what is happening.
Finally, you know what to do next.
Finally, you can act confidently:
Cuurios. Stop Thinking. Start Doing. 
You guessed it: this is our  fresh brand story and ‘Stop thinking. Start doing.’ is our new pay-off. All this is reflected in our fresh identity design as well: our new identity is based on abstract dots representing data, assets or people. When literally put together in a grid,  somehow a seamless flowing figure always appears; a (work)flow from one dot into the next. The visual feels as if the square boxes each showing a part of a dot can be shoved around in order to create new surprising workflows. This represents the curious nature of our company: what else is possible with the given combinations?
It’s important to note that we also use a single dot as well, representing  ‘stop thinking’ and action: the ‘doing’ part of our brand pay-off.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-633" src="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/05/CuuriosVisualIdentity-1-300x111.png" alt="" width="700" height="260" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/05/CuuriosVisualIdentity-1-300x111.png 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/05/CuuriosVisualIdentity-1-768x285.png 768w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/05/CuuriosVisualIdentity-1.png 770w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" />
The round and square grid lines derived the visual language form the basis of the logo design. The logo feels ‘effortless’, just like workflows should ideally feel too. The last two letters in the logo are seamlessly connected, representing what we do with assets, data and people:
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-634" src="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/05/CuuriosVisualIdentityLogo-300x113.png" alt="" width="700" height="263" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/05/CuuriosVisualIdentityLogo-300x113.png 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/05/CuuriosVisualIdentityLogo.png 743w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" />
All these elements come together in an identity design, of which an example is shown here:
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-635" src="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/05/CuuriosVisualIdentityOverall-300x168.png" alt="" width="700" height="392" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/05/CuuriosVisualIdentityOverall-300x168.png 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/05/CuuriosVisualIdentityOverall.png 719w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" />
We’ve chosen a specific colour palette, consisting of green and purple tones.
According to colour psychology, green represents renewal, balance, harmony, self-control and growth: all things we seek in creating seamless workflows for our clients. We give processes the ‘green light’ so to say: stop thinking, start doing, right? The colour purple stands for wisdom, compassion, creativity and magic. By applying our wisdom and creativity and by being compassionately and curiously interested in our client’s processes, we ‘magically’ improve workflows that previously felt clumsy or elaborate.
We’re really happy with the result. It feels like an important milestone in the growth of our company and it truly gives us  a sense of pride. Many thanks to the whole team, to Secondstage Ventures for their valuable input, to Niels Vrijhoeven who helped us out with our brand positioning and our brand story,  to Jop Quirindongo for the identity design, to Dave Pelham for the photography and the guys of CCID.nl for the revamped website.

A fresh brand story and identity for Cuurios.

It is never easy, to let go of things, that accompanied you from the beginning. But change isn’t supposed to be easy. With heavy heart towards the old, but also excitement for the new, we are saying goodbye to our old office and old website. With our increased number of colleagues, our office simply does not have enough room anymore, to give space for all of our members, and while we are mainly working from home according to the current recommendations, we are hoping that soon enough, we will be able to have a full house – in our new office in the new <a href="https://nextdelft.com/" data-redactor-span="true">NEXT Delft</a> building!
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<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-470" src="https://cuurios.test.ccid.nl/content/uploads/2022/04/122_NEXT2-300x212.jpeg" alt="" width="300" height="212" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/122_NEXT2-300x212.jpeg 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/122_NEXT2-1024x725.jpeg 1024w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/122_NEXT2-768x544.jpeg 768w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/122_NEXT2-1536x1088.jpeg 1536w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/122_NEXT2.jpeg 1757w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
<h2> A new online space</h2>
While it is easier to decide, if your company outgrown the office, it is harder to come to a decision, that we did in fact outgrown our website as well. Next to our increasing number of content, and our growing team, the past year we also became much clearer about what and how we want to show about us, to you.
And it turned out, we have a lot to say.
So we started working with a team of professionals (<a href="https://nielsvrijhoeven.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">Niels Vrijhoeven</a>, <a href="https://lowres.nl/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">Jop Quirindongo</a> and <a href="https://ccid.nl/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">CCID</a>), to help us along the way, to make our online space represent us, our goals and mission in a clear, different, but still very familiar way.
<h3>Our product on the market!</h3>
We have been <a href="https://cuurios.com/en/blog/80/digital-transformation-the-monster-under-the-bed" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">hinting</a> about it, <a href="https://cuurios.com/en/blog/70/snapshot-10-introducing-the-saas-platform-to-accelerate-your-asset-performance-powered-by-cuurios" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">talking</a> about, almost literally all the time the past year. 2022 is the year, when our SaaS platform product becomes available, and we can’t even begin to describe, how excited we are about this! Stay tuned (<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/cuurios" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">Follow us on LinkedIn</a>), or get to know more – <a href="mailto:LdeGraaf@Cuurios.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">contact us</a> for a demo session!
<h3>Keep on growing!</h3>
„When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” We have to say, Jack Welch was not wrong – leaders or not, every member of our team is about growing. Growing personally, professionally, growing themself and growing others. One of the greatest things is seeing a group of people becoming a team, and welcoming every new member as old friends.
It makes us even more confident looking at the upcoming year, as we plan on further increasing our team to a number of 15 people by the end of the year.
&#8230;in with the new
Change is a challenge, but it&#8217;s the only way forward. We love a good challenge and embrace the change with all of it&#8217;s obstacles. 2022 will be the year of changes for us &#8211; some aspects we already know, while others will unfold through the next 12 months. There is only one thing we are sure of: we are ready to take it on.

New year brings a new era for Cuurios – welcome to 2022!

The first time I heard &#8220;she/he is a developer&#8221; was when I started working at a  software company in 2012. We were told we can ask them about everything we want and I thought, &#8220;wow, this is so cool&#8221;. From that day for about 6 years I worked with engineers on a daily basis an average 10 hours each day. Due to the fact that all things were new to me, I googled every word they said in standup.
I learned from them, grew with them, and became more and more interested in coding. Imagining millions of people are using something based on my idea and I imagined that I was the one who built it. My dream was to create my own website and share with the world everything I was passionate about, like a movie director.
<h2>New chapter of my life</h2>
“Change you job!”
“Start coding!”
“This is the thing you always wanted! “
“This is your destiny!”
These words were etched into my head over the years. The thought was both ambitious and frightening.
At first I started learning by myself, reading product codes, participating in technical solution design, and enjoying the moments as much as I could. Finally, I heard the voice clearly and decided to follow my heart. Thus, I quit my job and started the new chapter of my life.
I knew I would face big challenges, but I prepared myself for them. Even though I got frustrated at times, cried for hours, and did many other things, I had faith in the path I had chosen. Thank you to my best and lovely friend who supports, teaches, and pushes me, especially when I feel frustrated.
In less than a year, I began interviewing for developer roles. Each interview taught me something new.
In between, I began my project &#8220;Book Lovers&#8221; &#8211; one of tens of ideas on my long list. At the beginning, I had to design, develop the backend as well as the front end. BOOM. How much work you have to do!
<h3>My Cuurios-story</h3>
As part of this process, I applied for a frontend developer role at Cuurios.
I will never forget my first impression of Cuurios. I was full of stress on the day of my interview, but they were so gracious to me. The company&#8217;s co-founder asked me questions and listened carefully to my responses with a smile on his face.
On the other side, the CTO was reviewing my project and asking technical questions, but before I could answer he said, &#8220;It&#8217;s okay if you don&#8217;t know it, it&#8217;s totally fine. You are a junior developer and you will learn it soon.&#8221; He said this, and at last I could breathe.
Now I&#8217;m working with them at Cuurios, and I&#8217;m so happy I made this choice.
Open-minded managers who accept your ideas, count on you, and encourage you to make decisions and mistakes, along with phenomenal colleagues who support you, teach you, and guide you through the learning process.
Now, when I finish a feature or task and then see the impact, I am excited, high-fiving myself and more eager to get started on the next one.
<h3>Curios about the world</h3>
My biggest hobby when I&#8217;m not working is reading books and watching documentaries. I am fascinated by physics, the universe, history, and by my favourite writer and thinker, Stephen Hawking. By reading about the past, forming opinions about the future, and putting those into the present, I am taught how to think, behave, and make my mark on this world. These things lead me to the conclusion that I should try harder and be better, and I think being a developer will help me achieve these goals.
Last but not least, I enjoy working with code and solving problems for users. I am a strong believer that I am on the right track and will help everyone who has a deep love for coding!
Thank you!
Happy to work with you Anna, Tamara, Michael, Leen, Gaetan, Adyasha, Marco and Andi!

“When I finish a feature […] I am excited, high-fiving myself” – Meet Tina

Does not matter if you are 5, 15 or 50. Everyone knows this creeping moment in the middle of the night when you suddenly „feel” the monster under the bed. You know it&#8217;s not real but you will still pull your feet back under the safety of your blanket.
The reason is the unknown. You know this room like the back of your hand, every corner, every furniture, every color, but in the dark, it looks awfully different, it holds the possibility of something going terribly wrong.
Companies that has been around for a while, that has known methods, a consensual way of working, are tend to have their ways set in stone. No matter how tedious it is, they know it like the back of their hand, and the unknown future that comes with digital transformation is their monster under the bed.
<h2>Curiosity killed&#8230; my job?</h2>
„You just export the data from here, and then take this blank excel sheet, and copy the data in here. Make sure you make no mistakes, check it 2-3 times, and then compare it there, and you e-mail John if this one is above the target range, and message Carla if that one seems to be showing a decreasing tendency over 3 months.
For now you can find all the previous months in this folder, but if you do it long enough, you will just know and won’t need to check back. If all is done, just email the final pdf to the list shared in here, but make sure to double check it, it changes regularly.”
Of the above „job description”, every word can be automated.
Human workforce is one of the most valuable asset a company has – and still some people are just wasted away on doing monotonous data management, generating spreadsheets and nudging people to look at them. It would be great to instead have empowered employees that take actions on automatically generated spreadsheets and dashboards.
Nevertheless, you most likely face resistance when the monster of change is creeping in: people will just want to stay in the safety of their comfort zone, where things are unchanged and their job is safe.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-479" src="https://cuurios.test.ccid.nl/content/uploads/2022/04/117_nick-fewings-5RjdYvDRNpA-unsplash-300x200.jpeg" alt="" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/117_nick-fewings-5RjdYvDRNpA-unsplash-300x200.jpeg 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/117_nick-fewings-5RjdYvDRNpA-unsplash-1024x683.jpeg 1024w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/117_nick-fewings-5RjdYvDRNpA-unsplash-768x512.jpeg 768w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/117_nick-fewings-5RjdYvDRNpA-unsplash-1536x1024.jpeg 1536w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/117_nick-fewings-5RjdYvDRNpA-unsplash-2048x1365.jpeg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
<h3>The way we were</h3>
It does not matter if its about going serverless, automating processes, or even so small as having a new design in the application the whole company knows and hates loves. When the change is around the corner, you tend to forget all the million ways you complain about how things are not working, and remember fondly of the days when everything was „so easy”. Understanding and applying the most recent technologies is not only scary because it&#8217;s unknown. The most frightening part is that it changes things you&#8217;ve always done the same way. The things you know.
Your day-to-day life, the way of thinking and working, the foundations of your work processes are about to change. .
Is it really necessary?
Do we really need to fix something that is not broken?
We had a way to travel before trains, cars and planes came along. We had a way to communicate before the telephone. We had a way to store, calculate and manupulate data before computers and we had a way to share knowledge before the internet.
We don’t need the change. But we should want it.
<h3>Knowledge killed monster</h3>
Knowing the goal, the expected result of a change, the landscape after the dust settled, letting your people understand why the change is necessary and how will they benefit from it is one of the most powerful weapons against resistence.
Take the self-driving cars for example. They take the fun out of driving. They reduce you to a mere passenger, they take your control away, some people may never even learn how to drive properly, they can be expensive to maintain and they can even be hacked! Not to mention if something happens, all that mess with the insurance and liabilities. Who needs that?
But self-driving cars can potentially reduce the traffic deaths by 90%, the harmful emissions by 60%, the travel time by 40%, could eliminate traffic jams and would make travelling by car accessible for more people without risk (<a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicles-safety#the-topic-road-to-self-driving" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">more information here</a>).
Information is your best tool, and with it comes acceptance. And the easiest road towards that goal is working with companies, that put you first. Together you can decide what your working processes will be like when the dust has settled, together you can shape your own landscape.
And the monster shall be slayed
Curious? <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/cuurios" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">Follow us on LinkedIn</a> to stay tuned or reach out to <a href="mailto:LdeGraaf@Cuurios.com" data-redactor-span="true">Leen de Graaf</a> today for more information!

Digital transformation: the monster under the bed?

Talking about domain hierarchy, moreover managing domain structure can be a challenge. When it comes to data management, analysis and display, more often than not developers takes the classic road: tables, lists and charts are in charge of displaying your data.
Using one of the above techniques to display the structure of a domain while not impossible, can be very confusing and challenging to use and oversee as a user. Structure and hierarchy are best displayed visualized, for example as diagrams.
<h2>Developed and tested for a business user</h2>
This may sound contradicting, but a lot of software are made by engineers for engineers. It has great tools, cool solutions, and everything available what an engineer would require and consider awesome. But having the right tool for the right job means not to think as an engineer, when designing or testing a software.
Since day one as a software engineer, I think of myself as an end-user with the tools of making the changes happen. That was the leading idea behind the asset management tool, every button, every functionality was designed and placed the way we would see it comfortable during the everyday use.
<h3>Domain build from scratch</h3>
One company has departments, others has platforms, solar plants or windmill parks. The common ground is they are all organized in a unique structure, where some technical terms may be included, but eventually, they all are very specific to the given organization.
For example solar plants has multiple rows all built up from individual solar panels, but they can also be part of a higher hierarchy grouped by location. Each asset in this hierarchy has its own unique name, that tells nothing to an outsider, but gives a lot of information for the members of the company.
Fitting these structures and relations into a premade hierarchy with limited connections is not only hard but can make the asset hierarchy representation detached from reality.
<h3>Your assets, your connections as you know it</h3>
Our tool provides you with a flexible, unlimited configuration, so each and every asset will have its own, well-known and company-wide recognized name in the system. No need to learn a new structure, you can just build your own from the ground up.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-483 size-full" src="https://cuurios.test.ccid.nl/content/uploads/2022/04/114_Snapshot12picture.png" alt="" width="1009" height="724" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/114_Snapshot12picture.png 1009w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/114_Snapshot12picture-300x215.png 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/114_Snapshot12picture-768x551.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1009px) 100vw, 1009px" />
Eventually, the whole structure will be represented as-is, the exact same way the assets are grouped and linked together in reality.
This flexibility provides great opportunities not only in managing the assets and the asset structure itself, but also in binding actions to a certain asset on any level.
<h3>Do you want to know more about our new SaaS platform?</h3>
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/cuurios" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">Follow us on LinkedIn</a> to stay tuned or reach out to <a href="mailto:LdeGraaf@Cuurios.com" data-redactor-span="true">Leen de Graaf</a> today for more information!

Snapshot 1.2: Customized domain structure for maximized efficiency

Our objective here at Cuurios is to provide the tools that will digitalize and streamline industrial operations, foster collaboration and ultimately unleash an industry data revolution. One of the very valuable and logical use cases for our software platform is the ability to manage, assign and track production related actions. These actions are (in many organizations) currently not managed in a standardized way and I’m sure most of you recognize all these different action lists in various Excel files on shared drives you’re supposed to keep an eye on…
<h2>What is it that we do differently?</h2>
Exactly that is what motivated us to do it differently, starting by listening carefully to the key criteria we collected during user interviews and conversations with clients. The resulting key criteria we sketched on the board at that time were the following:
<ul>
<li>User friendly, intuitive to use</li>
<li>Performant, also on remote connections with limited bandwidth</li>
<li>Flexible, customizable and scalable</li>
<li>Asset centred, industry ready</li>
<li>Data-driven</li>
</ul>
We want our users to like working with our tools by motivation and not because they are forced to. This simply means we put user experience as our top priority. The simplest things can make a huge difference when it comes to usability. During the first trials with users, we’ve put all our effort in it to make sure every button, entry field or other user interaction in the tool is logical and intuitive for them (and not just for us as product owners 🙂 ).
<h3>What does it imply if we put user experience first?</h3>
The tool is optimized for use in limited bandwidth environments, resulting in a very snappy and performant UI, even in remote locations. This is the result of a strong focus on the optimization of the application data structure and architecture as well as the optimization of all our data calls (only load the data you need seems a simple philosophy, but unfortunately not the reality in many applications).
Flexible because we understand not every company is the same. So if a client is used to name the priority of an action ‘severity’, they can configure it to be labelled as severity. And if you want three simple straightforward severity levels to select from or five or ten, it’s your choice. If you want an action to be constructed of five simple properties or twenty, all fine! We basically allow you to fully customize the template of your actions and their lifecycle (workflow) to fit your case.
<h3>Why is it such a good fit for asset-rich industries?</h3>
Asset centred because we focus on solutions for asset rich environments. Actions in these environments are simply always related to assets. A plant, a unit, a pump a vessel, you name it. Your asset structure is represented in the solution by importing the asset hierarchy and definition from your asset management tool. This allows to link the actions to the asset it concerns. It also allows you to set the user permissions linked to the assets.
And the best of all? You can fully automate the creation and the state (i.e. from open to closed) based on your streaming production and asset data. Translating your data to meaningful insights using simple rules, thresholds and complex algorithms has never been so easy. You’ll never miss any of these insights as we provide powerful features, to track, assign and manage these actionable insights.
Want to learn more? We’re happy to demonstrate our product: please leave us a message at: <a href="mailto:info@Cuurios.com" data-redactor-span="true">info@Cuurios.com</a> and we’ll contact you to set up a demo!

Snapshot 1.1 – Action management re-invented: foster collaboration and streamline operations!

Delft, 29 June 2021 &#8211; The Rabobank Startup &amp; Scale-Up team has provided Cuurios with substantial growth funding to further scale the company. Cuurios is a fast growing software technology provider transforming the industry and redefining leadership in a digitized world. The combination of an investment round closed earlier this year and the growth capital raised today, Cuurios is in the position to gear up for an exciting journey!
Our objective is to provide the tools that will digitalize and streamline industrial operations, foster collaboration and ultimately unleash an industry data revolution. For one of our clients the automated and data driven production advises in order to produce to the optimum and avoid asset failures contributed to a 3% production increase.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-490" src="https://cuurios.test.ccid.nl/content/uploads/2022/04/94_InnovationloanCuurios-300x170.png" alt="" width="300" height="170" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/94_InnovationloanCuurios-300x170.png 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/94_InnovationloanCuurios-1024x580.png 1024w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/94_InnovationloanCuurios-768x435.png 768w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/94_InnovationloanCuurios-1536x870.png 1536w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/94_InnovationloanCuurios-2048x1160.png 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
As part of our vision, we want users to feel the power of their own data, integrate their data sources in a user-friendly and intuitive way, and combine, process and transform their data in meaningful actions, data to action!
Rabobank supports innovative companies and sees the social and economic importance of startups and scale-ups. The bank founded the Startup &amp; Scale-up team, especially for this target group.
Fabian Groeneveld and Robbert Lut work in the team from the Delft – The Hague region and explain: “We believe that the technology of Cuurios will enable asset-rich companies to translate the value of their data into actionable insights, making their asset management more efficient and accessible via a SaaS platform concept”.
One of the very well recognized and valued use cases for the Cuurios platform is the ability to manage, assign and track production related actions. Today, in many organizations these actions are not managed in a standardized way. You might very well recognize all these different action lists in various Excel files on shared drives you’re supposed to keep an eye on… Cuurios eliminates all these unmanaged lists, and delivers a well-managed, flexible and scalable solution in return!
<h2>About Cuurios</h2>
Cuurios is a Delft based software technology company. We enable our clients to optimize their processes translating their data into actionable insights. The resulting actions are managed, assigned and tracked in fully transparent and intuitive software platform, embedding the value of data analytics in day-to-day operation!
<h3>About Rabobank Startup &amp; Scale-Up team</h3>
An innovative idea can be the driving force behind the economy or give an impulse to job creation. This is why Rabobank supports starting technology-driven entrepreneurs and established a dedicated Startup &amp; Scale-up Team to help these entrepreneurs by opening up their (international) network, knowledge and funding instruments.

Rabobank provides Cuurios with growth funding!

I didn&#8217;t choose software engineering. It chose me. My first job was site content management using a html redactor. The manipulation of the content was pretty cool and exciting for me and had a permanent impact: I decided that I wanted to further develop myself as a software engineer. After a couple of years I became a full stack developer, and nowadays I mostly work with back-end technologies and DevOps engineering.
One of the most exciting aspects of programming for me is to see that the code you developed is used by actual people, affects, and improves their everyday lives in so many ways. You release a product and see people interact with it, use it, getting work done with it.
It is motivating to see something I built come to life. It gives me energy to create something that didn&#8217;t exist before. It also gives me joy to implement interaction between structure and dependencies within a complex application. Playing with algorithms, frameworks, methodology is like fixing a puzzle or making a puzzle of my own.
The time management process helps me organize my work more efficiently, because being busy isn’t the same as being effective. Every morning or the evening before I make a plan on how to divide my time between activities. I sort activities by priority, complexity and time consumptions to make my day as productive as possible.
It is my priority to have a healthy work-life balance. Beside my main job I am an aerial hoop instructor and a competing athlete. This is a huge part of my life and brings me a lot of energy.
This year was difficult for all of us, I miss my group classes and students, but also it gave me the opportunity to give online and private classes. This summer I am going participate in the national IPSF competition in professional senior category.  This is a big event in my life, I spend almost all my free time preparing for this competition and I hope everything will go smooth.
<h2>My Cuurios-story</h2>
After one and a half years living in the Netherlands and feeling more confident as a professional as well as in my social life, I decided to change my job: that is when I applied to Cuurios. Cuurios got my attention as it is a fast-growing start-up and they need the right people to grow.
Working at a start-up allows me to try a lot of different opportunities and responsibilities, even that weird one that I didn’t think I would ever like but find out that I did. I came into Cuurios as a full stack developer, but now I feel comfortable in a lot of different areas such as DevOps engineering or as a back-end guild speaker, just to mention a few.
The Cuurios team when sees a problem, they think of an innovative and original way of solving it. They are the best people to learn from. They continue to challenge me when I present a solution. They have a different approach than I do, that gives me a broader understanding of the different ways to find solutions.

”Being busy isn’t the same as being effective” – Meet Anna

We started Cuurios because we are convinced that data and information in leading organizations will be used to optimize the processes. We successfully verified our vision running many successful projects at various customers in different industries. We enabled our enterprise customers to automatically translate their data into concrete actions. Replacing an entire chain of Excel sheets, e-mail messages and text messages. The resulting efficiency gain and positive performance impact surprises our clients again and again.
“The digital-tool developed by Cuurios allows us to further streamline our daily operational tasks. I very much appreciate the flexibility, fast response and easy going cooperation with Cuurios.”
The positive impact of these solutions made us realize we had to push through. The lessons learnt at our launching customers inspired us to design and develop the leading SaaS platform in the market of asset intensive enterprises. The sophisticated data to action solution accelerates customers’ performance by an order of magnitude. We enable you to learn from yesterday, know what&#8217;s happening today and predict tomorrow.
<h2>So, how do we do that?</h2>
Engineers are enabled to develop their own algorithms and workflows and configure standard elements as they see fit. The analytics technology used to get insights from your data does not per se need to be complex (i.e. AI or learning algorithms), the trick is to select the right technology for your particular use case! We’ve seen that analytics initiatives resulting in meaningful actions, well embedded in the regular daily work process has a much bigger chance of success compared to yet another fancy dashboard. This has already allowed our customers to avoid multiple production stops, by making smarter use of existing assets and production data.
<h3>Absolute control</h3>
We know the feeling: trying to fit a square peg in a round hole – the asset structure and hierarchy of companies cannot be simplified and generalized without compromises. Instead of forcing engineers to somehow adjust their already existing domain representation to a prefixed system, our tool allows complete control over hierarchy, connections and structures, which allows users to eventually have the perfect representation of a domain with no compromises. All that with a graphic display, to be able to overview and edit in a fast and convenient manner.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-497" src="https://cuurios.test.ccid.nl/content/uploads/2022/04/85_AssetAndWorkflow-300x130.png" alt="" width="300" height="130" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/85_AssetAndWorkflow-300x130.png 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/85_AssetAndWorkflow-1024x443.png 1024w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/85_AssetAndWorkflow-768x333.png 768w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/85_AssetAndWorkflow.png 1141w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
The &#8216;brain&#8217; behind the asset structure (left) and unique, customizable workflows (right)
<h3>Utter flexibility</h3>
Utilizing these assets in digitalized workflows takes the daily work to a next level, and how it is used, it is up to the end-user. Engineers are free to build action management tools or any other templates necessary to minimize the daily workload and automate processes with no limitations.
Templates and workflows built from scratch allows every company to have their own, unique way of work, not having to get in line and standardize their already existing and perfectly functional ways.
<h3>The tip of the iceberg…</h3>
Managing assets, actions, inhibitions, monitoring production, automating processes, turning all those excel sheets into a functional, dynamic, easy to use tool that provides insight, access and complete control – and so much more without compromises.  This is not just a product, not yet another tool that promises the moon and eventually cannot even provide one fading star.
This is a SaaS platform solution in the making, with the users in mind, with care and honestly: love. The Cuurios-team nurtured every piece of it, raised it, criticized it, took it apart to put it back together better, shaped and re-shaped it, until the moment when it wasn’t just done, but it was WOW.
This journey started when Cuurios was born, and now it is time we share our experience and results. We cannot promise to write about it in an objective manner (because seriously, have you ever seen a proud parent not gushing about their child?), but we can promise not to overpromise, and while being proud and sharing the proud moments, we will be transparent about our challenges and our own growth during this incredible, ongoing journey.
<h3>Stay tuned!</h3>
If you can forgive us for not being always objective, if you don&#8217;t mind developers gushing and cheering about their own work and how cool it is, but mainly if you want to be part of our journey while building a one-of-a-kind SaaS platform for asset intensive industries &#8211; <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/cuurios" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">follow us on Linkedin</a> and we will shed light on all the little details, professional tricks, outstanding end-user possibilities as well as our challenges and obstacles along the way.
Already want more? Learn more about domain representation from <a href="https://cuurios.com/en/blog/52/work-as-youre-used-to-tailor-made-domain-representation-with-graphs" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">our previous article</a>.
&#8212;&#8211;
*Featured image: <a href="https://www.freepik.com/psd/mockup" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-redactor-span="true">Mockup created by freepik</a>

Snapshot 1.0: introducing the SaaS platform to accelerate your asset performance, powered by Cuurios

I grew up in a small village in the Dutch province of Zeeland. During my childhood I spent a lot of my free time outdoors playing with my friends, climbing trees, building tree houses, playing football and swimming in the sea. My father was (and is) a watchmaker and as a small boy I was always intrigued seeing him repair watches and clocks. Looking at all those small parts ultimately forming one single system that tells time. I guess that during those days my passion for technology started, although at that time I excelled taking clocks apart, not repairing them…
Later I got intrigued by the possibilities of computers as we got at home in the late 1980’s: a Commodore Amiga 500. Initially we used it to play games, but soon after that I tried coding new games myself.
At relatively young age I already knew I wanted to be an engineer and I ultimately decided to study Mechanical Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. During the Master phase I specialized in the field of human machine interaction. This is all about making sure you provide people with the right information at the right time to make sure they will be able to make the best possible decisions. This is the red line in my career so far: utilizing (software) technology to help people make timely and well-founded decisions.
<h2>My Cuurios-story</h2>
Gaëtan and I started Cuurios in 2018 because we’ve noticed that many industrial big data analytics projects face difficulties to make it into daily reality. In our vision you need to add business value in the early stage of digitization and transform data into prioritized (and assigned) actions for it to be taken seriously. The underlying technology to transform the data does not need to be complex (i.e. AI or learning algorithms), the trick is to select the right mechanisms for your particular use case! Most importantly, make sure you well manage the actions resulting from these data analytics: your average dashboard does not do any of this!
In my current role I get a lot of energy bridging the gap between the customer’s daily reality, new technology and software development.  I’m enthusiastic, curious and people oriented. We typically like to listen very carefully to our clients ideas and requirements and ask the right questions in order for us to be able to deliver software solutions with a WOW factor: always go one step further!
Both professionally and privately I like complex puzzles, varying from large data sets, challenging customer use cases all the way to large LEGO Technic sets. I am confident that this mindset helps me to keep pushing boundaries in search for that missing piece!

Bridge between human and machine: a people person in the IT industry – Meet Leen

My very first program was written in Turbo Pascal. It was a very simple little application, where you could give your birth date, and the app was telling you your astrological sign and all the main characteristics. That was over 20 years ago, when computer science classes for the students in my country meant learning how to turn on and off a computer and change wallpapers.
I was always intrigued by the possibilities of this technology, and my primary school teacher was really happy that someone showed interest, so we started learning the real things, hardware and software as well. After primary school, I never again had the same opportunities or means to keep on learning.
Fast forward almost two decades, in my late twenties, still trying to find my passion, becoming tired and burnt out from marketing and copywriting that I was doing for over a decade, and not finding joy in being in law school either – mainly because I saw my future as lawyer, and suffice to say that it wasn’t as „romantic” as I imagined it.
From customer relations officer to HR assistant, from journalist to head of marketing I tried myself in many 9 to 5 jobs, until one day I decided, I wanted to do something completely different. At age 27 I decided it was time for a real change – and I started learning again. In just 3 years I became a web designer, and after rediscovering my love for coding, kept on learning to become a full stack developer.
Today, for the very first time in my life, I can finally combine my need for creativity and challenge, I can connect the missing dots. Before coding, when I had an idea, I always thought: „how cool it would be”. But today, I know how to make it happen, I have control over what happens and how, and I can bring all those ideas to life.
&nbsp;
<h2>My Cuurios-story</h2>
Cuurios is my very first workplace as a full stack developer, but I believe I could not have been any luckier. I am not only a „coder” who translates an idea into code – my ideas are appreciated, and I can work in my own rhythm, try and solve problems alone, but always get support if needed. This is an environment where I believe an entry level programmer can really thrive, learn, and grow as fast as possible, facing challenges, a huge variety of tasks, being responsible but still getting all the support necessary.
Feels like it was yesterday when I created my very first hangman in python as a student. Back then I did not even dream of creating enterprise applications in just a couple of months after school, but with all the tools and support provided at Cuurios, I never felt uncomfortable facing that challenge.
Being a full stack developer helped me grow as a person as well. Learning how to make mistakes a thousand times and keep on trying until you get it right, knowing when you reached your limit and being able to ask for help without feeling uncomfortable about it – it is all part of a developers life as much as life itself.

A writer’s journey to software engineering – Meet Tamara

Big Data, machine learning, AI – the hype words that will pull you into the magic circle of modern technology. Everyone wants it, everyone wants the possibilities, the growth, the kickstart that can be given to you by a good amount of data and a smartly designed software built around it.
But then why 87% of the data analytics, big data and AI projects fails? Aside from organizational and cooperation-relatedproblems (more info <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/19/why-do-87-of-data-science-projects-never-make-it-into-production/" data-redactor-span="true">here</a>), there is more behind this amazingly high failure rate.
<h2>Is your data good data?</h2>
You could ask is good data and bad data actually a thing? Well maybe not in itself – but data without context is worthless (read more in our earlier blogpost <a href="https://cuurios.com/en/blog/47/do-you-recognize-the-value-of-your-data" data-redactor-span="true">here</a>). Building the wrong relations, the wrong connections, having the wrong approach and conclusions can make your data bad data.
Like when in The Big Bang Theory Leonard, Howard and Raj found some notebooks of a late physicist, <a href="https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/Professor_Roger_Abbott" data-redactor-span="true">Professor Abbot</a>,filled with hundreds of pages of seemingly random numbers without any notes or explanation. Seems like something important, maybe it is his life’s work, maybe it contains something important, exciting isn’t it? Realizing that it is in fact his daily calorie intake diary such a bummer&#8230;
You can’t know if your data is valuable if you don’t have the context. You have to know what this data is about, otherwise you might as well end up building a model to predict some long dead professor’s calory intake….
<h3>Seemed like a good idea&#8230;</h3>
There are a lot of projects that fail because they seemed like a good idea, but in reality were completely worthless.
A company that had a relatively high employee turnover decided to up their „HR game”. They started researching the signs of people resigning, trying to predict which employee will leave the company soon. They tracked measurable data, like the number of years they worked for the company, their commuting distance, their salary, overtime, sick leaves and some hardly quantifiable data like their engagement to the company. They were looking for detectable connections, that will help them make their employees next move predictable.
While in some cases, collecting data and finding connections simply turns out to be not viable at all in production, in our case, that was not the problem. The issue was the wrong understanding of what data is and what data science and statistics can do for you.
The company actually was planning to use the knowledge they earned: they were planning on using it in their evaluation and hiring process. The idea was to evaluate new candidates on their likelihood of leaving, and only hire those applicants whose likelihood of leaving the company in the first 3 year is below a certain rate.
<h3>&#8230;but it simply does not work that way!</h3>
Now this sounds great, isn’t it? Just add in a couple of variables about your new candidates, and a software will spit out the possibility of them becoming a loyal, long-term employee.
Is it doable? From a programming point of view, with quantifiable variables, it is no magic to create a program like that. But will it work? The answer is a straight and obvious no.
Besides the fact that collecting data like this is questionable at best, with regards to the privacy of employees, it does not make sense from a business perspective. If we really give some deep thoughts of why anyone would want to quit their job, the factors are multiple, and are neither predictable, nor measurable for start. How someone will respond to workplace dynamics, or personal issues they might encounter, are not quantifiable and cannot be predicted even with the utmost caution.
And beware of the self-fulfilling prophecy! A simple notification to a manager that a certain employee is most likely to leave the company in the near future based on these parameters will itself affect the workplace dynamics – and might bring upon what one wanted to prevent.
The idea completely ignores the single most important thing of why some people stay at a workplace even when underpaid or working extreme hours, and why others with a generous salary or personalized benefits will still leave. And that is the human factor (read more <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathankeane/2020/10/26/uber-drivers-launch-legal-action-over-robo-firing-by-algorithm/#61d0d4a31487" data-redactor-span="true">here</a>).
<h3>Causes or consequences – did you make the right conclusions?</h3>
But let’s assume, that you are able to quantify and take into consideration every human factor – that is probably a mission impossible, but sticking to the above example let’s just assume it for a second, and try and dig deeper of why the idea is inherently wrong.
The software would calculate a vast number of variables, that are not decidedly causes, but most likely consequences of an employee leaving the company. Having less overtime, going on a sick leave, besides of other factors can actually be consequences of an already made decision: our employee already decided to leave, and preparing for the change, is looking for another job and so on.
The algorithm does not predict, it just tells us what is happening. We are too late to do anything about this employee leaving. That is how wrong connections, or even only seemingly existing relations can make your data bad data – and lead to wrong conclusions and wrong business strategy.
<h3>Machine learning and its limits</h3>
Last but not least, even if you get every single part of your use case right, although we mentioned it in our <a href="https://cuurios.com/en/blog/46/data-is-about-your-business-not-just-technology-and-algorithms" data-redactor-span="true">previous blog post</a>, but it can never be emphasized enough: machine learning can be a goal, but it is very rare, that it can be your first step of data analytics. The reason for that is simple: you need huge, and I mean really huge amount of data for your software to be able to actually find working relations, rule out the insignificant factors, be aware of unique cases and extremes and create predictions that will actually give you useful and trusted information.
Having a machine learn relations, connections, create predictions is not so much different than having economists and researchers conducting statistical analysis. You need an unbiased representative sample to get to a conclusion, and to avoid biased sample you need to know your population. In our example case even if we ignore any other issues, simply reviewing 500 employees actions are just not enough to be able to get clean data that can be used as a base of any sort of prediction.
For a kickstart, most companies don’t need machine learning right away: synchronizing, centralizing your data, and automating just some of your daily tasks can already be a huge step towards the right direction.
This is how sometimes even small but fast companies on the market are able to steal market share from well-known giants: they already know that there is no need to reinvent wheel to gain momentum.

Big Data or Big Mess?

Being a teenager in the 90s, with the internet, mobile phones and all sort of exciting new technologies coming up, it was hard not being enthusiastic about Computer Sciences!
After finishing my degree (Computer Science and Networks), I took a detour, working as a consultant, busy with the soft side of IT (writing design documents, requirements, sketching business and IT processes, these sort of things). After a while I realized that I wanted to go back to the core of technology and changed focus towards more technical and code related work.
The real joy in coding for me is creating something out of your brain, and see it come to life &#8211; something most programmers would recognize. In addition to the creative thinking and joy of creation, computers follow straightforward logical patterns, what you code is what you get. Refreshing compared to working with humans (Not that I have misanthropic tendencies, but hey, everyone will agree, people can be difficult 😉 ).
I am result-driven, inquisitive, and professional, always curious, and ready to learn new technologies as well as dive deeper in what I already know. I love challenges and new discoveries, which makes my field as a professional really broad. I do not like to fit in a box and am eager to always keep learning! So, java bytecode, deep learning, graph databases, SQL, high level architecture ontologies, web technologies, security, networking, bring it on! 🙂 .
<h2>My Cuurios-story</h2>
I am one of the owners, Cuurios is my baby. As a child of the first internet bubble, of the Amazon and the Google era, being an entrepreneur has always been one of my deepest dreams. You can see it as an extension of the coder’s creative drive. Thinking out, designing, and developing a visionary product and bring it to market, full control, and total responsibility. Daunting, yet exhilarating!
As owner and lead developer Cuurios gives me the possibility to completely give direction to the work, according to my own ideas, and to where I want to go. It also gives me the freedom of setting my own agenda and being able to work as I wish – probably every thriving programmer dreams about that at some point.
In addition to that, I believe Cuurios does not only hold value for the owners or the employees. We aspire to deliver real values to our customers, always helping them to get the most of their experience with us – not just with our products, but also every level of our communication, every step of us working together. We are very proactive, and we tell it how it is, we can expect no bs from us!

Curiosity and result-centricity a.k.a. what drives a technology pioneer – Meet Cuurios’ co-founder Gaëtan

After a first month as part of the YES!Delft investor readiness program, it is time to share some thoughts on the process, what we’ve learned so far and how it impacted us.
DISCLAIMER: This light-hearted description is only very loosely based on reality and should definitely not be taken at face value 🙂
Like most, we started this journey as enthusiastic entrepreneurs, completely sold onour ideas, focused on how great it is and all the cool stuff we have in petto, the myriad of functionality it will provide and how it will revolutionize the market. We were pretty confident, sure of our game.
Then we had 1 minute to pitch.
Big Fail
<ul>
<li>Everybody understood we had something great, nobody could quite get what it was all about.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Investors are from Mars</h2>
That would be the first thing we learned. Pitching to an investor (or a prospective client) is not about YOU, it’s about THEM.
Investors speak the language of TAM, SAM, SEM, ROI, Churn, Business Models, Valuation, EBIDTA, Cash Flows&#8230; Learning the investor’s lingo was a damning task, like learning a second language full of acronyms and numbers. Frustrating at the beginning, very enlightening in the end. It really helped us get our story straight and forced us to do the math. Cause you’ve got to do the math. You can’t stay forever in the fluffy stage.
The first hurdle passed, it was not the end of it. We had some numbers, great, but what was it again that we sold? And, most importantly, sell to whom?
<ul>
<li>Ok, you’ve got 30 seconds.</li>
</ul>
Hmm, yes, you know, we make software that does stuff with data, and it’s super cool.
At this point we knew we had to do something about that elevator pitch.
<h3>Elevator  pitch</h3>
Here comes the <a href="http://www.pitchblocks.com/" data-redactor-span="true">WOW method</a> in place. A simple method to get your ideas straight and write an elevator pitch with a true WOW factor (yes, it is in the name).
Suddenly, it all made sense. This is the story we want to tell, these are our customers, and this is what their pain is.
Elevator pitch much improved, still some way to go, but at least most people now understand what we are trying to achieve.
<h3>No free lunch</h3>
Now that we’ve got a good enough elevator pitch, and some numbers, time for what we’ve all come for: Show me the money!
Again, a good learning experience: there is nothing like a free lunch in this world. Investors are not charities, they’re in for the big bucks! And how to convince them that you are the next Google when you are a fledging start-up?
<ul>
<li>Get some customers on board, build traction, show you’ve got it!</li>
</ul>
But wait a sec, to build any sort of real traction we first need to finish up our product! And wasn’t raising money supposed to help get us there? It seems a bit like a chicken and egg story, isn’t it?
Welcome into the real-world people!
There are some options fortunately, government grants and loans, to help you get started and get you through this first stage in your development, without of course forgetting the most common investment of all, some good old-fashioned hard work!
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
So far, a very valuable program, it has helped us to sharpen our message, build up our case, and get us ready for the next stage!

YES!Delft: Investor readiness program – A partial view

Part of my final year of international business at The Hague University of Applied sciences is to do an internship. During this engrossing year I was lucky enough to do my internship here at Cuurios. I have followed almost every business related subject during the last 3 years at my university, ranging from human resources to finance to operations management. I always missed a really tech related subject which is quite important in the modern days. I’m really happy I can fulfil that missing piece here at Cuurios.
I applied to do my internship at Cuurios because it is a relatively young, still small sized but growing company. I like this size during this internship because even though I am an intern at Cuurios I am also part of the team and I am really responsible for the tasks assigned to me. Although the pandemic has made us work from home most of the time, I am still able to get proper guidance and plenty of sparring opportunities.
Whilst I’m doing my internship here, Cuurios participates in the Investor readiness program by YES!Delft. It is a really interesting program where I get the opportunity to translate gained knowledge from my study into reality. I help Cuurios to prepare for an acceleration of their business, this ranges from a good company value proposition and pitch to a financial planning and business plan. The tasks are diverse and I’m able to work however I feel best suited while still being coached and questioned which I find is working perfectly.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-516" src="https://cuurios.test.ccid.nl/content/uploads/2022/04/72_IMG1826-300x225.jpeg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/72_IMG1826-300x225.jpeg 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/72_IMG1826-1024x768.jpeg 1024w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/72_IMG1826-768x576.jpeg 768w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/72_IMG1826-1536x1152.jpeg 1536w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/72_IMG1826-2048x1536.jpeg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Outside workhours I like to do sports. I play field hockey myself and train and coach other teams. When the wind is present and there is any time left I’ll be out on the water kitesurfing. During vacation I like to sail and in the winter enjoy the slopes on skis and snowboard.
I’m grateful for this internship opportunity here at Cuurios, I have learned a lot here already and I am sure that many educative experiences will come in the near future.

From theory to reality: internship at Cuurios – Meet Bram

For me, programming came in late. I wanted to be a lawyer, I had graduated high-school with all hopes of studying law, but a light shone and a voice called out to me &#8211; “Michael, study Computer Science instead”. I then honoured the call and started preparation to get admission into University to study Computer Science. Thankfully, I got in.
In my first year (2012), I was introduced into the art of programming.
The idea of me building something for people to use was similar to being given a magic wand, which felt very good. I started experimenting with Visual Basic, the drag and drop system helped me easily visualize my ideas.
Year after year, I delved deeper, building applications for friends and small organizations. Everything changed when I was paid to build an application in my third year, a holy grail was given to me. I didn’t know people would pay you for what you enjoy doing most. It was an eye-opener.
To me, programming is not a task, but a hobby, and creating things is wired in my core. I became a frontend web developer because it’s the closest programmable bit to the user (had not discovered Product Design at that time) and I enjoy that feeling of being able to engineer experiences for users whilst controlling what they see and how they use the application as a whole.
As humans, it’s pure happiness to see people follow you. In programming, it’s the same feeling, if not more when you see metrics of the people that depend on what you build. I like the influence, though little, to control how people carry out their daily important business, leisure or personal tasks using my applications.
<h2>My Cuurios-story</h2>
I joined Cuurios in October 2018; a very good decision I must say. I applied because I wanted to learn how things are done in other companies, and Cuurios’ “Data to Actions” tagline sounded like a place that would boost my programming knowledge and nudge me to code more complex applications.
At the very beginning, my first project gave me sleepless nights, as I didn’t understand most of the application. I bought whiteboards and started disintegrating the project to understand the whole quite-complex system. Now, however, I have gotten a better grasp of working on complex systems, my frontend skills have improved dramatically. The best decision so far. I feel my role in Cuurios is important (very much to me), I control how and what the customer sees. Though you need to have a very keen eye for design to do this and Cuurios has enabled me to perform this art efficiently, even using my little Product Design skill. Although I cannot single-handedly add a button anywhere I like, but I can make sure the button sits where it can be easily accessed.
At Cuurios, every ticket is like a HackerRank question, especially when it comes from Leen (COO). Sometimes I’d have to read and re-read to be able to digest the problem and think of a suitable solution which has improved my problem-solving ability. I ask questions a lot and that has helped me grow. In addition to that, Gaetan’s (CTO) experience has made me a better programmer. I take time to study the codebases of the applications built. (When you learn from the best, you become like them).
I also wonder sometimes, how Leen does it, that he is everywhere from a business standpoint. I’ve learnt from him that you need to understand the customers’ request in-and-out.
I believe Cuurios is a place to be to sky-rocket your career and build fantastic projects, and most importantly everyone at Cuurios is human.

“Programming is not a task, but a hobby” – Meet Michael

One of the common issues we face when developing applications for industrial customers, is the issue of accurately representing their domain.
A domain is the set of assets, equipment, departments, systems, that make up the whole of a company’s operations. Organizations usually have fine grained definitions of who should be responsible for managing a specific asset, which department resupplies systems, etc.
A software system should integrate with an organization structure and enable its operations. More often than not, they achieve the opposite, requiring organizations to fit their processes and structure inside their own rigid asset structure.
While promoting standardization, this approach stifles organizational innovations. It leads to faulty and incomplete domain representation, as assets are not recorded as they are, but as fit the system, or not recorded at all. In the end, many systems end up being hacked by system-integrators or in-house teams to make them fit, or a custom solution is being developed.
Very often these limitations are driven by technological limitations, SQL databases (still the norm for most industrial applications) requiring a rigid structure to be performant.
<h2>Graphs</h2>
We think that domains can best be described using graphs. A graph is a representation of information using node (vertices) and links (edges).
The following example should help to shed some light on the concept, and explain why we think it is such a great fit for representing domains:
<ul>
<li>Company A operates a small plant.</li>
<li>The plant has systems, composed of equipment or sub-systems. An equipment or a sub-system can be shared by multiple parent-systems.</li>
<li>At the same time, each equipment is linked to 2 departments, the maintenance department, and the production department.</li>
<li>Each equipment also has supervisor, a specific person, and a back-up supervisor pool, a pool of people that can be called up if the supervisor is unavailable.</li>
</ul>
Now you can see how this would start to be very complex when designed in the traditional fashion, leading to complex and inflexible implementations.
Now look at how we could implement this using a graph:
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-523" src="https://cuurios.test.ccid.nl/content/uploads/2022/04/63_DomainGraphExample2-252x300.png" alt="" width="252" height="300" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/63_DomainGraphExample2-252x300.png 252w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/63_DomainGraphExample2.png 650w" sizes="(max-width: 252px) 100vw, 252px" />
Suddenly your complex domain can be organized in a nice, coherent way, all relationships being represented exactly the way they are in reality. There is no limit as to how you should configure your operations, register your assets, organize your teams.
Of course, graphs have existed for a long time. They just have been notoriously difficult to implement in traditional SQL technologies as such. They are mostly used in the design phase of a traditional implementation. They describe the rigid tables and relationships that are then hard coded in the database structure.
<h3>What has changed? Graph databases</h3>
A graph database is a database that has been specially designed and implemented to deal with graphs. They can traverse graphs to look for relationship insanely fast and are faster than a traditional tailored-made SQL model would.
In a graph database you define your graph as a graph. Tables, relationships, everything is configurable at runtime, there is no rigid structure. The graph evolves together with your domain.
A graph database comes with its own language for querying and managing graphs directly. Developers do not have to worry about implementing the graph logic. Application managers do not have to worry about the maintaining integrity. The database takes care of it all.
Graph database technology is now mature enough to be deployed as support for industrial grade applications, and alleviate the limitations created by the SQL databases technology. Products such as SAP OrientDB or Neo4J have been around for a while, are battle tested and widely used.
At Cuurios, we think it is time for the industry to embrace graphs. Let your applications represent your business, and not the other way around!!
<h3>STAY TUNED!</h3>
Cuurios is currently developing its brand-new software platform according to these principles.
It will combine this new representation of operational domains, with self-service algorithms and hands-on data processing, to create a platform that works for the engineers and the operators!
But more on this next time!

Work as you’re used to: tailor-made domain representation with graphs

A couple of introverts sitting in front of multiple dark screens with green or white texts running on each, typing with untraceably fast fingers, only the keyboard clacking breaks the silence&#8230;
Although during the last decade the perception of programmers may have changed: instead of mom’s basement, they are now imagined in a fancy, futuristic, well-equipped environment, the basic personality traits of geeks are still perceived the same.
<h2>Just typing, and typing all day&#8230;</h2>
&#8230; well honestly, no. As software developers we spend most of our times with designs, research and problem solving. We could actually sit down and start writing your application the second we got the assignment, but that’s not the effective way. You want good, steady result, fast, and there is only one way to that: design, plan, research, and finally code.
Yes, we can type fast. Yes, we can sit in silence and focus for 8 hours without so much as taking a lunch break – or at least some of us can. Yes, we are coding in the evening, in the weekend, in our freetime, even in our dreams sometimes – because we LOVE solving problems. Give us the most complex ideas, the impossible tasks, and we will trigger happy, and start working on them straight away.
Yes, we ARE geeks, but that doesn’t make us mysterious, unapproachable, introvert or unsocial. We can easily come across arrogant, but most of the time it would just take forever to make you understand the details – we don’t have God complex, we just know, that it’s better to get it done, than explaining how will we get it done.
<h3>We adore technology and advancement!</h3>
I mean, there is probably no surprise there, but we love to surround ourselves with the latest technological advances – be it about our physical surroundig, or our codebase. So we research, we read, we learn. We get familiar with new frameworks, libraries, advanced solutions every day – then apply our newly acquired knowledge in your software, making it better, stronger, faster, safer.
<h3>How do you recognize a good developer?</h3>
Now this can be hard – as a person not knowing anything about software development, how can you tell, who will be the professional skilled enough to get the job done?
The good news is, you don’t need technical knowledge to make that decision. Good professionals stand out. Not by having millions of frameworks listed in their CV-s, not by having multiple years of experience – although that is not a bad thing –, not by asseverating they are the best, or the only ones who have a solution for you.
Good professionals stand out, because they are enthusiastic and passionate. They simply love what they are doing, they are able to switch to problem solving mode, and even start braimstorming with you to enhance your ideas as soon as they understood your needs. They are perfectionists, simply because they want to be proud of their making, and give it the best they can think of.
<h3>„Okay, but what about the sneak peek?”</h3>
And yes, here we are, after all this talk about what developers are not doing, let’s see how we at Cuurios actually turn your idea into software, so next time you work with a programmer, you will have a better understanding of what we really do [1].
<ul>
<li>Driven by curiosity we listen carefully what you want and challenge what you need.</li>
<li>We read the documentation, getting a nice, overall picture of what you need.</li>
<li>We read the documentation again, going into details, stop here and there for a second, making notes.</li>
<li>We just sit and stare. Now this might look like we are not doing anything, just staring out of the window, waiting for the day to end, but this is the part where at least 20% of the work gets done. We write and design the whole application in our head, tracing our steps, making mental or actual notes, connections, stripping the whole use case down to logic, numbers, actions, and finally breaking it down to parts.</li>
<li>We read the documentation again. I know, by now we should know by heart, right? But at this point, we make notes, create diagrams, start researching for the best solution, the latest technologies, the most useful libraries.</li>
<li>Brainstorm. Yes, programmers rarely work completely alone. We use our colleagues recommendations on solving similar problems they encountered, share our experience, and learn from eachother. Even if this happens online.</li>
<li>Depending on the duration of a project, we prepare the sprints, or the first couple weeks at least, read the documentation one last time (I know, right?), include every little detail in tickets, organize the workflow, then get started with the typing all day&#8230;</li>
</ul>
From here on out, we do the same routine every day – although it’s never the same and never gets boring:
<ul>
<li>In the morning, we prepare for the day. We go through what we finished the day before, decide on and preapre for the next steps.</li>
<li>A daily scrum meeting keeps us accountable – also a very good place to see if someone got stuck, needs help, or just a different approach or idea to get out of a deadlock.</li>
<li>During the day: design, research, code, test, debug, finalize, repeat. For each and every small part of the application, until we get a result we would proudly present.</li>
</ul>
Good software developers take pride in their work. They don’t just enjoy creating solutions for you, they are just as happy – if not even prouder and happier – as you are, when you start using what they made for you.
[1] The working method described here is Cuurios-specific, other companies and teams may have different ways to divide tasks and manage their workflow.

Sneak peek: this is how we build software at Cuurios

Every company works with data. Productivity, prices, stock, you name it, anything that makes its way to the next report and helps you take the next step – just numbers. Chosen the right strategy, you can make these numbers work for you.
<h2>A case from the trenches</h2>
We dedicated the previous blog post to the value and importance of your data. You might already be intrigued to imagine how those numbers can save you a lot of work and even make your company more successful or “just” simplify your decision making process. It’s time to do something about it.
But then what? It might be very tempting to go for the new and shiny, to start an Artificial Intelligence (AI) project because that is the future and you are afraid to miss the boat. But AI requires a very high digitization maturity and work best on very specific use cases.
The technology has some known drawbacks, requiring large amount of (mostly labeled) data. It also lacks in so important auditability, a real and valid concern for many business leaders.
Focusing on this far-way horizon may lead you to over-reaching, over-spending, and might actually backfire. Lacking in tangible results to show, it could reduce the willingness to invest in data and data technologies. You will miss the low hanging fruit that will add value to your business and will help champion data in your organization.
Through a real use case at one of our customers, I will try to explain how we managed to integrate data and create value by integrating a use case that mattered.
<h3>The use case</h3>
This customer is responsible for the operations of multiple industrial sites, each producing 24/7. At the beginning of the day, engineers gather data, calculate, and analyze the shortfalls in production from the day before. What was the reason, was it planned, what can be done about it, will this impact our overall production, etc.
This data needs to be revised and approved by the operational and reporting team and reported officially to management.
Until very recently, they would extract data from their process data historian, process it through an excel sheet and pretty much run the process by hand using the Microsoft Excel.
A repetitive and error prone process, with little value in the data wrangling. A perfect candidate for automation!
To support this customer, we deployed a solution that would:
<ul>
<li>Fetch the data automatically from the OSIsoft PI data historian</li>
<li>Run an algorithm to detect production shortfalls and faulty input. The algorithm tries as well to infer the cause of the production shortfalls from previous related cases.</li>
<li>Present the results in a Web UI, including history and raw data</li>
<li>Present the detected production shortfalls to engineers and operators for analysis and validation</li>
<li>Extract the results into the right format for exporting to the reporting system</li>
</ul>
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-530" src="https://cuurios.test.ccid.nl/content/uploads/2022/04/52_CuuriosShortfallv2-300x161.png" alt="" width="300" height="161" srcset="https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/52_CuuriosShortfallv2-300x161.png 300w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/52_CuuriosShortfallv2-1024x551.png 1024w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/52_CuuriosShortfallv2-768x413.png 768w, https://admin.cuurios.com/content/uploads/2022/04/52_CuuriosShortfallv2.png 1227w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Now, engineers and operators can come to the office in the morning, and the data about the production shortfalls will be ready for them to analyze and validate, resulting in:
<ul>
<li>Less work intensive process</li>
<li>Better accuracy</li>
<li>Easier analysis based on charts</li>
<li>History of production shortfalls under your fingertip</li>
</ul>
Since the first version, we keep refining the process, adding new algorithms and new mechanisms to streamline even more of their operations (For example, producing production reports automatically from the production data)
<h3>What can we take from this?</h3>
The algorithm for analyzing production data is not based on machine learning or fancy AI techniques. It is a regular algorithm designed together with the process engineers.
But it delivers exactly what the customer wants and provides tremendous value to the business.
While running complex machine learning algorithms might add some value in the future, focusing on them right from the start would have diverted us from what we really wanted to achieve:
<h3>Providing the business with value!</h3>

Do you recognize the value of your data?

Nowadays data is everywhere. It is the hot topic of the moment, for businesses and in the general public. There are heated debates in politics about “Data”, data wars, and even a new science entirely dedicated to data!
When it comes to data, you might be wondering, should you build an enterprise architecture with data as your starting point (data-centric)? Or build a data structure around the existing landscape (data-driven)? What about data lakes? Do we actually have any data?
Well, tackling data is highly dependent on the specific configuration of your organization history, business, and IT landscape.
At Cuurios we believe that Data should be CENTRAL to your organization. Gathering, managing, and acting on your data is your core business. But there are no one-size-fit-all solutions. Data is a mindset, the most important is to just do it, however small the first steps might be.
In this blog post I am giving some insights on how we see Data at Cuurios and sketching the first steps towards data proficiency!
<h2>DATA</h2>
It sometimes feels like data is something new, something very hot, the core of the 21st century technological battlefield. But data has been there for a long time! Measuring, gathering and analyzing data is at the core of the scientific and industrial revolution. Without Galileo gathering data on the moons of Jupiter with his telescope, there would have been no proof that Copernicus was right, and we might still be thinking that the earth is at the center of the universe.
Data is not a thing, a disincarnated entity that exists for and of itself. Data is grounded in reality, it is information that represents assets, people, events in the real world. Data is what makes large-scale organizations possible. Without data, how would you know what the state of you inventory is without having to recount every time? What the state of a critical asset is without having to look at it?
The first form of writing ever discovered, the Sumerian tablets [1], were accounting records of production and exchanges of goods, i.e. data.
What has changed to make data the focus of a new gold rush?
<ul>
<li>Storage capacity has increased exponentially. When a Sumerian scribe needed hours to imprint a clay table, we can now record terabytes of data for very little cost.</li>
<li>The internet (as in the complete networking infrastructure). No need to have people do the measurements and record the data themselves. Everything is be automated.</li>
<li>Advanced in computer power has made the application of advanced AI algorithms cheap and rewarding.</li>
</ul>
This list describes techniques to store, manipulate, and analyze data.
What it does not describe, is a change in the nature of data. People tend to concentrate on the new hype, assimilate data with data science, and equate analysis with machine learning. This is a very narrow view of what data is and limits its usefulness to a few very advanced use cases.
Because first and foremost, data is information, information about your business, its customers, its assets, its financial state. It represents the tangible and is often the only thing you have to steer large complex organizations.
We think that data should play a core role in every organization, be CENTRAL to decision making and action taking. Without data, any decision taken is an educated guess.
<h3>THERE IS MORE DATA AROUND THAN YOU THINK</h3>
In practice, we often encounter organizations that claim not to have any data. Because they don’t have a data lake.
The first thing they have on their data roadmap then, is to create one. But really, a data lake is just a big database. It won’t tell you what to do with your data. In our experience, many organizations, after having spent an incredible amount of time and budget on creating a data lake, are stuck. They don’t know what to do with it.
Because your data is about your business, not technology, not algorithms.
What we usually see is that organizations already have data, very often plenty of data, scattered around, in custom made applications, asset databases, excel sheets. Because you can’t function without data.
What they lack is an approach, a concrete process to manage data, to embed it in its day to day operations. The data processing, the algorithms, should come in support of operations.
Making sure data is part of your operations day to day business, that is being data-centric.
In order to do that, you need to reverse the data analysis process, look at your data from a business perspective:
<ul>
<li>What are my most important use cases, processes, assets?</li>
<li>Which data do I have about them? Where can it be found, in which format? Do I need more of it?</li>
<li>How can we automate this specific use case? Which algorithm can be used?</li>
</ul>
At Cuurios, we have extensive experience working in the industrial sector. In most Industrial settings, processes will already be described. They will be backed by data for real-time monitoring, stored in a historian. Optimization and analysis algorithms are known.
The actual running of the algorithms, the analysis of the data and the generation of advices is traditionally a step performed by engineers, in Excel, Matlab or others. Tools great for exploration and scientific inquiry, but not made for automation.
For most companies, there is tremendous value to be added by connecting data sources to each other and automating their analysis. Actions can be defined and set-out quicker, with a better response to issues and a higher efficiency.
[1] <a href="https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/a-stray-sumerian-tablet-unravelling-the-story-behind-cambridge-university-librarys-oldest-written" data-redactor-span="true">https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/a-stray-sumerian-tablet-unravelling-the-story-behind-cambridge-university-librarys-oldest-written</a>

Data is about your business, not just technology and algorithms

At Cuurios we are keen to develop software solutions that use your process data to deliver valuable insights. The OSIsoft PI Asset Frameworks (PI AF) provides a hierarchical, asset centric model of data with detailed history, which is indispensable to monitor and further analyse vital production data in the industry. It means millions of records of real-time and historical data. This data is invaluable, provides not only useful insight but also the possibility of improvement for better control and efficiency when processed and displayed right.
<h2>Have you chosen wisely?</h2>
Having a database filled with vital information is not more than a pile of values, up until the moment when you put that data to work. Every number, every date, every remark can be useless or on the contrary: it should help your company to work smarter, not harder. 
Making the right connections, creating useful relations, calculations and transforming your data into concrete actions is what our motto, data to action means. Poor choice of data to process means poor, sometimes even useless insights. Modern technology provides you the tools, to make your company’s job easier – an overflow of data on the other hand will just make everyone’s life harder.
<h3>Let’s get technical</h3>
During our several encounter with PI AF (using the Web API) we learned some useful lessons and tricks. For those with an IT experience, the fact that the extended use of a framework also means dealing with its limitations and shortcomings is not all too surprising. In case of the PI AF, the main obstacles we had to overcome were related to the limit of search queries, result sets, and performance issues due to the excessive amount of information.
<h3>The use-case</h3>
One of our use cases were monitoring and handling inhibition values on offshore gas production platforms – more precisely detecting when an inhibition for any checkpoint is turned on, and track it’s changes until it is turned off. The added value lies in a well-managed and monitored safety system.
<h3>Finding the PI points</h3>
These checkpoints do not just belong to one asset or even one asset type, in fact, they can be found all over the asset tree. This is where the PI AF built in search query comes to the rescue.
https://MyServer/piwebapi/search/query?q=name:*INHIB
The above query gives us almost 6.000 results. Although PI AF has the possibility to set the size of the result set, the built in maximum limit is 1.000 item per page, which means a minimum of 5 REST  requests in parallel to process the almost six thousand items. 
What makes it complicated to work with PI AF at the very beginning is the fact, that the above query does not provide us values, or any actual data about the PI point other than it’s  WebID, the unique identifier used in PI AF. As a next step, querying the WebID gives you direct access to the actual values of a certain checkpoint.
<h3>Performance with over 6.000 REST request?</h3>
Although now we have all the inhibitions points directly accessible with their unique WebID, the reality is, checking all of their values takes roughly six thousand get requests. If you can’t imagine what that exactly means, below an example:
https://MyServer/piwebapi/streams/yourWebID/value
6.000 of these requests need to be sent and processed. It takes in our particular setup over 5 minutes. Can you imagine pressing a button and waiting for over 5 minutes for the result? Let’s all just be honest – the reality is, most people lose their patience even after a couple of seconds, because even that loading time is unacceptable nowadays, let alone 5+ minutes.
<h3>Let’s build stream sets!</h3>
Implementing a working Refresh button at this point was the last straw. While the updates where running only hourly in the background, this 5 minutes wasn’t great, but still barely noticeable from a user point of view. Up to the point, when we placed a button on the page for manual refresh purposes. Then it became clear: we need another solution. 
After some research we found out, that the PI AF Web API supports bulk data retrieval even for unrelated pi points, the only thing you need is the list of WebID’s. These queries are called stream sets and are providing fast bulk retrieval.
https://MyServer/piwebapi/streamsets/value?webid=yourWebID1&amp;webid=yourWebID2
Only a couple of things to keep in mind:
<ul>
<li>the URL has a length limit, in our particular setup we could retrieve the values for approximately 400 WebID’s in one stream set (the length of the webids varies, make sure you test this extensively in your setup);</li>
<li>it is necessary to adjust your method to handle the response accordingly, as the result is a list of json objects called Items,</li>
<li>if any of the WebID’s in the stream set runs on error, the whole request runs on error, meaning even one unavailable WebID and the whole request goes down the drain.</li>
<li>Implementing stream sets meant we could reduce the number of REST request from 6.000 to 15. Additionally, a stream set request response time is not noticeably longer than a simple value request, so our performance got a big boost: from over 5 minutes down to an average of 10 to 15 seconds.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Summary</h3>
Building something really meaningful on top of a database with literally millions of available records, if done smart, can improve the way you organize your work. Focusing on what you need to know, what you need to see from those information at first blink means you can put the carefully collected data to work. It is not going to make the decisions for you, but it can help pointing out when and where you need to make decisions, take actions.

HOW TO: achieve a performance boost with the PI Web API

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Clients tell us that implementing our product feels like their data-congested brain finally gets the much-needed neurological wiring that prompts action. Finally, you understand what is happening. Finally, you know what to do next. Finally, you can act confidently.

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