Interactive dashboard for large-scale analytics

The Omgevingsdienst Zuid-Holland Zuid (OZHZ), the environment agency for the Zuid-Holland province, is responsible for ensuring businesses operate safely and within environmental guidelines. The team needed a holistic view of how businesses were operating in the region and to prioritise its resources based on each organisation’s risk profile.

With Royal HaskoningDHV Digital, OZHZ built an interactive platform that brought together data from multiple sources and used both direct data analysis and machine learning to make connections and fill gaps in the information.

The challenge

Taking responsibility for the environment

The Omgevingsdienst Zuid-Holland Zuid (OZHZ) is an environment agency that’s responsible for ensuring that companies throughout the Zuid-Holland province of the Netherlands operate in line with health and safety and environmental guidelines.

To do this effectively, the team needs to know every business in the province, how it operates, and its risk profile. This requires a holistic view of a huge range of data points covering company information, geographic data, and reports from regulators –something OZHZ was lacking.

OZHZ approached Royal HaskoningDHV Digital to help the team do targeted analysis based on the data available to them –and how they could use new levels of insight to improve oversight and intervention throughout the province.

The solution

Building a comprehensive data source

OZHZ and Royal HaskoningDHV Digital worked to bring together geo-information, trade register data, regulatory reports and more to create a comprehensive database that covered all the businesses in the province. The system links all the information about an individual business together, so the OZHZ team has a full picture of every one.

There are sometimes gaps in this data –which meant the teams had to find an intelligent way to link information from different sources. Part of this is done manually, using direct analysis to use the team’s own specialist knowledge of common business characteristics.

The platform also incorporates machine learning, which analyses complete data sets to identify the most likely characteristics and categories to fill in the missing information.

The resulting platform is an interactive dashboard that displays the findings from the team’s analysis –and the outcomes from the machine learning algorithms –all in one place. It features a map, pop-up information about each business, and options to filter results based on different parameters.

There’s also a tab dedicated to insight into health and safety and environmental compliance, highlighting the score for each business and any violations that the team needs to look into.

The result

Adding efficiency to everyday processes

By consolidating and linking these disparate data sets, OZHZ and Royal HaskoningDHV Digital have created a source of reliable, contextualised information that gives the team unprecedented insight into how businesses are operating across the province.

With a holistic overview of common violations, average compliance scores and other key metrics, OZHZ is now able to schedule inspections more efficiently and draw up more targeted policies to ensure the citizens of Zuid-Holland have a safe and clean environment to live and work in.

The team also has a new awareness of the quality of their data sources –and which could be improved for an even more comprehensive platform.