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Since its founding in 1996, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) has worked to improve and conserve the country’s environment and natural resources as well as ensure that they are used sustainably in ways that contribute to economic growth.

To meet these goals, SEPA monitors and assesses water, air, and soil quality, advises on environmental regulation compliance, and provides best practices to Scotland’s government and business, as well as the general public. This means that SEPA has vast amounts of data from a wide range of sources dating as far back as the 1950s.

These huge amounts of disparate data need to be collected and analyzed to create useful data-driven insights, but SEPA was constrained by slow, time-consuming manual processes. 

Updated Analytics Provide a Transformative Impact

After rolling out a modern analytics platform, the change at SEPA was immediate and significant. With TIBCO Predict solutions, SEPA’s staff no longer had to struggle to find data or perform analysis using traditional spreadsheet tools. Now, armed with more powerful analytics tools, they could also identify patterns in its data that never would have been possible before, including persistent problem areas that had kept SEPA from achieving its environmental protection goals. 

According to Jonathan Bowes, Senior Specialist in SEPA’s Informatics Unit, “Previously, staff were in the office, looking for maps, asking for phone numbers. Now, all the facts are available to them, and they can focus on being in the field where they need to be.” 

The agency started with an analytics use case focusing solely on reviewing and mapping the trends and changes in water quality. However, it rapidly expanded to include use cases that encompassed its entire organization, including tools that allowed the staff to collaborate on verifying and cleansing data, as well as tools for business strategy, human resources, and more.

Positive Changes Across the Community

By sharing its dashboards with organizations like the national Scottish Water Utility, SEPA could also use its platform to affect positive change in the greater community. These organizations were now able to use SEPA’s tools to model and assess the environmental impacts of their planned projects. 

“We had a lot of users, and an especially lovely story was that charities began using the tool. For instance, one group focused on avian conservation using the tool to find areas where a grant could be used to protect birds,” explained Graeme Cameron, Principal Scientist in the Informatics Unit.

The agency’s dashboard also allowed them to make their environmental findings more accessible to the general public. People could now check SEPA’s automated daily water and air quality predictions and plan their outings accordingly.

Is TIBCO Predict Right for Your Organization?

Now, more than 80 percent of the SEPA staff are using TIBCO Predict solutions to create dashboards and data science tools that:

• Reduce their project times by 66 percent
• Reduce overall noncompliance by 40 percent
• Empower their staff to work collaboratively
• Allow SEPA to play a much more impactful role in conserving and improving Scotland’s environment and ensuring its sustainable use for economic growth.

By sharing its dashboards with organizations like the national Scottish Water Utility, SEPA could also use its platform to affect positive change in the greater community. Click To Tweet

TIBCO Spotfire analytics is the most comprehensive data analytics solution on the market and delivers capabilities like streaming, predictive, and geolocation analytics at scale. Paired with TIBCO Data Science solutions, which empower your users to innovate and solve complex problems faster, your organization has the tools to accelerate projects, promote collaboration, and deliver smarter, more valuable insights. 

To learn more about the Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s digital transformation, check out this recent case study and technical case study companion.