Every day the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, according to IBM. That’s one billion billions—a one followed by 18 zeros, every single day—a staggering figure impossible for the human mind to grasp. With ever-increasing computer processing power, companies can now mine that data to uncover hidden patterns, correlations and other information to help them make better business decisions.
Since 1995, CGN & Associates, Inc. has helped organizations worldwide improve their performance, profitability and global competitiveness. With more and more companies “drowning in data,” CGN spent six years developing a solution. The result was Tada Cognitive Solutions (TADA), which spun off as a separate company last year. By bringing together company data from a range of disparate sources, TADA promises to help its clients make sense of it all, creating “a common operating picture that connects organizational thinking, inspires collaboration and solves problems at 10 times the speed and one tenth the cost of traditional approaches.” iBi recently sat down with TADA’s leadership team to learn more about its approach to product solutions and plans for the future.
Tell us a little about Tada Cognitive Solutions. How did the company get started, and by whom?
After six years of developing the intellectual property, Tada Cognitive Solutions, LLC was formed in July 2016 by CGN & Associates, Inc. (CGN). The founder of the company is Seshadri Guha, CEO of CGN. The rest of the TADA leadership team consists of Mark Hanback, General Manager; Ram Muthukrishnan, Director of Product Development; Mike Clark, Director of Business Development and Sales; Jake Hamann, Director of Marketing; and Jim Comisky, CFO.
TADA is a “spin-off” of CGN. The TADA platform is actively used across CGN as a critical part of their consulting services. CGN is also a reseller of TADA to some of their clients.
Describe your product and the value proposition you offer to clients. How does Tada differentiate itself from competitors?
The cloud-based TADA solution turns complexity into a competitive advantage by quickly connecting data from multiple sources to unleash real-time collaboration, problem solving and strategic decision making. At 10 times the speed and one-tenth the cost of alternative products, TADA’s 360 view creates unique insights that spark innovation and drive value across an entire enterprise. Key data elements from existing business systems are quickly extracted and interconnected into an end-to-end business landscape. TADA’s “infinite navigation” provides clear and agile visibility of information that enables intuitive and detailed analysis to drive value to the bottom line.
What types of clients is your product best suited for?
The ideal customer is “drowning in data” that resides in multiple, disparate databases to the point of being “paralyzed”—unable to make timely business decisions and effectively collaborate across the enterprise. We listen to our customers to identify their specific challenges and “pain points,” and then design a solution that quickly addresses their needs to drive improvements in operational efficiencies and resource and asset optimization. TADA products are adaptable across a wide range of industries and customers. Our 360 view solutions are designed for multiple organizational functional leaders (e.g. CEO 360, CFO 360, COO 360, CIO 360, etc.). From an industry/customer perspective, our initial focus is on manufacturing, supply chain and healthcare, eventually expanding to retail, consumer packaged goods, insurance and government.
What does it mean to “build a digital duplicate of your business in the language of your business”? Describe how this works.
When we talk about creating a digital duplicate, it involves building a digital model of a business’ network, including all related data associations. We start by working with the client to understand their business and create a digital representation of physical and spatial characteristics of the enterprise in its semantic form. This includes people, products and/or services, physical locations, organization structure, customers, competitors, processes, etc. The digital representation of the business captures not only the specific properties of each of these business areas, but also the multi-dimensional associations and properties between the different individual digital representations. Metadata extracted from this network in the language of the business allows for the creation of unique perspectives not otherwise possible. Business data in any form and different sources are then bound to this semantic representation to create the “neural network” of the business.
How does this differ from a traditional online “dashboard”?
The digital duplicate enabled by TADA imitates the capability of the human brain and allows decision makers to work around the current limitations of thinking and technology. It harnesses the exploding business and data complexity and creates extraordinary visibility without the limitations of traditional dashboards and visualization tools. TADA’s differentiation is the speed with which companies can leverage their digital double to drive insights and decisions from months and years to days. Extraordinary visibility across the connected enterprise through our infinite navigation capability enables decision makers to change perspectives as required and to collaborate real-time from any device. TADA is not about determining how many and what reports or visuals you need, but how you can allow your creative and innovative thinking to be matched by the seamless access and navigation through the digital enterprise. TADA is 10 times more scalable, 10 times more efficient and 10 times faster than other comparable solutions.
How can better utilization of data be used to drive strategic decision making? Describe an example.
One of our customers needed to evaluate their worldwide footprint to increase efficiencies and optimize assets. Within a few weeks we built a TADA solution that connected various data sources (facilities, suppliers, competitors, products, sales, etc.). This solution enabled the client to consolidate operations and improve cost structure. Without TADA, this would have taken significantly longer and would have been a much more costly process to achieve these results.
What lies ahead for the company in 2018 and beyond?
We have a detailed, three-year technology roadmap consisting of new products across multiple industries, as well as innovations in the areas of voice recognition, artificial intelligence, IoT, etc., to drive rapid growth. One significant opportunity we see on the horizon is a TADA solution for an “individual”—a university student, a physician, a patient, etc.—that provides an end-to-end, 360 view of that person’s world.
Anything else you’d like to add?
One of our key objectives is to rapidly grow our Peoria-based business and stimulate the local economy by providing exciting career opportunities across the community. iBi
For more information, visit tada.today.
