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are costing the company much more than
anyone had ever imagined and, upon reso-
lution, will significantly impact the bottom
line in a positive way. Business intelligence
tools provide the visibility needed to uncover
those hidden costs that have for so long been
masked by "averages." When the first cold
snap hits this season and the phones start
ringing off the hook, stop and think about
how many of these calls could have been
prevented and perhaps resolved on your
schedule over the summer, had you only
known that these same people call every year
at the same time. It's all in the data!
Summary
Over the past thirty plus years, we have
witnessed the use of technologies in our
industry progress at an ever increasing
rate, automating what was once manual
processes, making our transaction flows
much faster and more accurate: on board
oil and service computers, bank interfaces,
routing software, just in time inventory
and much more…all great additions to our
environment. These best of breed applica-
tions provide us with an abundance of data
that, when combined with all the other data
on our networks, can overwhelm the best of
us, but not if you can bring it all together in
an organized fashion and then know what
questions to ask of it. Business Intelligence
should not be shunned as simply just
another reporting tool, but viewed as the
next progression in forward thinking tech-
nology required in our evolution, for we
finally have a solution that is new, required
AND transformational.
Robert Levins is a Managing Director
of Angus Performance Advisors, formerly
known as TAG, a business intelligence solu-
tions company acquired by Angus Energy
in the fall of 2010. Prior to founding TAG,
Levins had been providing enterprise-level
software solutions to the petroleum industry;
when he saw that the industry needed bet-
ter and more advanced management and
performance reporting, he created his own
company in 2000 in order to fulfill that need.
His professional journey began in the petro-
leum industry in 1972, while in college, and
in the nearly forty years since he has worked
for companies such as Petroleum Data
Corporation of Princeton, STS Systems out
of Montreal, and Structured Management
Systems in Richmond, VA.
BUSINESS OPERATIONS
l F O N
Robert Levins
