| | OCTOBER 20228CIOReviewRESOURCE ADEQUACY AND GRID FLEXIBILITY DEPEND ON ANALYTICS FOR ENERGY STORAGEImagine working in a bakery where a customer calls in to place an order for 100,000 chocolate chip cookies for the next day. You go through all the planning to ensure you have the ingredients in stock, the staff available to bake and the means to deliver the cookies to the customer.Now imagine coming to work the next day only to find out the 100,000 chocolate chip cookie order was changed to 75,000. You also had a few more customers call in to have 75,000 sugar cookies and 50,000 peanut butter cookies. Due to allergic reactions, you must bake these at a different location. Finally, imagine the ingredients you need for this order will take 4 hours to get and you do not have the space to store all of them. This scenario gives you a bit of insight to what a concrete producer faces. Our "recipe" is called a mix design, and the ingredients are mainly cement, coarse aggregate, fine aggregate and water. Also, much like the cookies, concrete is perishable--it has about a 90-minute shelf life before it starts to setup. Additional challenges in the ready-mix concrete industry include logistics and weather.We need special trucks to transport the finished good of concrete, and bad weather will adversely impact the job site and ability to place concrete. This means on any given day, 20-80% of the scheduled work could change.Storing the ingredients of the mix design presents another challenge. The coarse and fine aggregates can be stored out in the elements, but cement and cementitious material must be stored in a dry container. Since the concrete lifespan is 90 minutes, this means the production facilities are often in urban areas with limited storage, and travel times can be extended due to traffic.Supply chain management must be continually monitored and managed.IN MY OPINIONBy Keith Onchuck, CIO, OzingaKeith Onchuck
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