Survey Anyplace, Inventive Designers and Datastories believe in Data Driven Product Management

The convergence of cloud, communication and IoT structure and the trend towards virtual applications bring about new challenges for application developers and infrastructure providers. The resulting systems are complex with dynamic resources that could possibly hide issues. This creates a demand for flexible monitoring and optimisation methods. The Flex4Apps Itea project, set up by German and Belgian organisations including Sirris and various companies, tackles the challenges of monitoring and optimising large distributed cyber-physical systems. The project objective is to create a solution to manage large volumes of data and to control the complexity of system monitoring with minimal disruption of the target system.

Sirris brought together three driven Belgian companies within the context of this R&D project that wanted to work on developing a data-driven product management system. The work of a project manager is never done which is why they investigated whether part of the task package could be managed automatically based on data. The study was based on the infrastructure the customer already has and uses.

Survey Anyplace, a use case provider based in Antwerp, offers the option of setting up online surveys with a high fun factor to encourage potential participants to answer the questions. The start-up goes a step further in data analysis with its software as a service (SaaS) product management: it measures customer use, analyses this data and applies the data in the form of context-sensitive content for setting up queries for the customer. Depending on the application and user, ranging from newbie to advanced, it provides tips on the use of all kinds of features in the surveys. This ensures that the relationship between Survey Anyplace and its customer is deeper and closer and can provide the most suitable support and advice..

Inventive Designers helps organisations to communicate better with its customers and improve the customer experience and increase their loyalty through software and cloud solutions intended for multiple-channel communications. The various applications of the company run in-house on the infrastructure of customers on large servers and collect logs when processing. This data is compressed, filtered and protected so that it meets the strictest General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and security requirements. Next it is sent to the Inventive Designers cloud. It is kept there and this ensures that the behaviour and use of the servers can be analysed. Based on this data, the sales, support and consultancy departments can draw up better proposals for customers and products can be adjusted in accordance with real customer requirements

DataStories International, based in Turnhout (Belgium), is a supplier of augmented data analytics software for industrial companies with a complex R&D or production processes. The company offers business domain experts and engineers the opportunity to interpret their data automatically so that they can themselves optimise complex R&D, production processes and services. They developed a tool for the automated calculation of the probability of, for example, an accident, that leads to specific models based on parameters. DataStories currently has more than 12 multinational customers in the chemical sector, who manufacture consumer products, plastics, food, drugs and machines.

Sirris took care of the project management and the link with Europe and German project partners. We are collaborating on the architecture, methodology and proof-of-concept at two of the three Belgian companies involved.