Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) Business Services recently established the Organizational Analytics (OA) team to enhance data-driven management, performance, and risk reduction of federal resources at the Savannah River Site (SRS).

According to a recent Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Inspector General (OIG) special report, Considerations and Use of Data Analytics, organizations can leverage data and analytics to evaluate transactional data in support of decision-making on policy, program operations, resource allocation, risk management and mission outcomes.

Bryan Ortner, SRNS Director of Organizational Analytics, said, “We must pioneer a standardized data governance structure, which is necessary to make critical decisions and gain visibility into the success of SRS programs.”“To close gaps in the adoption and use of data analytics, representatives from SRNS OA, Information Technology, and Strategic Improvement and Innovation aim to empower all SRS organizations to understand, validate, and securely control data, while driving analytical innovation,” continued Ortner.

 On June 19, SRNS Business Services introduced the first Data and Analytics Center of Excellence — a monthly forum bringing together SRNS professionals to exchange best practices, lessons learned and advanced technologies.

During the forum, SRNS Financial Systems Business Analyst Erin Brown demonstrated a recent and remarkable data analytics tool – designed in Oracle Analytics Server (OAS) – for Additional Regular (AR) hours. Brown’s filtering and tracking tool prompted discussions on AR hours, offering new insight into timekeeping policies.

Brown explained, “This dashboard provides management with insights into employee’s AR time usage and the balance of earned versus taken AR hours. This data can help eliminate biases in timekeeping, identify areas needing additional hires or rescoping, and suggest policy improvements.”

In addition to these live demonstrations, Richard Proctor, SRNS Director of Enterprise System Solutions, provided a subject matter expert talk on the importance of building a healthy data governance culture from the ground up 

SRNS Site Services Ransom Baughman and Mike Alimpich demonstrated the Microsoft Power BI Maintenance Dashboard which creates practical reports and work orders. The tool can produce filtered reports for performance tracking and forecasting 

Lance Waddell, SRNS Senior Vice President and Director of Business Services, emphasized the importance of transforming data into valuable insights and tools to elevate SRS’ performance. 

“These conversations and demos will create a shared understanding of data security, ethics and how we can leverage data to better manage our performance,” said Waddell. “Creating this cross-functional ‘A-team’ is key in this transition to data-driven decision making and was the first step in becoming a unified, seamless and scalable solution for SRS.”