Global management consultancy, Partners in Performance, has ranked third in the nation's Most Innovative Companies for their Virtual Experts AI solution.
Recognised in the Professional Services category by Australian Financial Review (AFR) BOSS, the development of this solution has been driven by the serious shortages of skilled labour facing heavy industries. In response, Partners in Performance and their prescriptive analytics arm, DataStories, have developed Virtual Experts to help organisations optimise processes quickly without needing additional resources. As operators in key roles retire and take their knowledge with them, a gap in capability has been created leaving organisations to address decreasing performance and do more with less to achieve growth – an issue Virtual Experts help overcome.
Virtual Experts are not a ‘black box’ AI. They are designed for operators – being browser-based (no-code environment), easy to use and simple to internalise. They enable operators and process experts to internalise data and optimise operations on their terms.
Unlike other solutions, Virtual Experts factor profit into the equation and auto-summarise the ‘so what’ into charts, adapting and learning as processes and operations change. This empowers operators to quickly improve productivity as new problems arise, helping them drive improvements in products throughout and quality while reducing cost and emissions.
Skipp Williamson, Founder and Managing Director at Partners in Performance, said "The transformation of organisations, industries and society that will occur over the next 20 years is of a scale we have not previously experienced. Our Virtual Experts can help organisations improve the working lives of their people while helping them tackle some of their largest challenges, such as skilled labour shortages and feed variability, by leveraging innovations like AI to achieve new levels of performance.”
Already proving their worth, Virtual Experts have helped clients achieve a sustainable 3-6%-point increase in recovery within months, reducing feed variability by 60-80% and instilling a new way of working across operations. Indicatively, a plant producing $800m per annum of mineral could realise revenue gains of $24-48m.
“There is no one single fix for the skilled labour shortages facing many organisations, but there are pathways that integrate new technologies and empower workers to achieve high levels of performance,” says Katya Vladislavleva, CEO of DataStories.
She concluded, “We believe our Virtual Experts will help change how organisations are run, with the potential to support heavy industry clients in overcoming skilled labour shortages by empowering operators to do more with less, learn new skills and support their efforts in achieving maximum impact.”
The firm also ranked in the top-10 most innovative companies in the AFR BOSS listing in 2022 for their Energy Transition Roadmap. This was the only innovation designed to assist businesses with achieving sustainability targets. Among the other top 10 AFR BOSS award finalists were global giants such as Accenture, Stantec, Deloitte, KPMG and King & Wood Allen.
Skipp Williamson, at Partners in Performance, added “We are honoured to be recognised in Australia’s most innovative companies list two years in a row. Innovation is at the core of our firm’s culture and our commitment to solving our clients’ problems through collaboration, simplicity, no harm and cutting-edge solutions. Our goal is to collaborate with stakeholders at all levels to ensure they have the required knowledge to continue to deliver, well after our work with them has ended.”
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About Partners in Performance
An agile, fast growing international management consultancy, the firm is a leading global player in driving operational excellence for complex organisations. The hardest challenge faced by senior executives with any change initiative is to make it last. By working as true partners with our clients, Partners in Performance enables lasting change in organisations; delivering both commercial impact and inspiring people to transform their behaviours (visit website).