Boston, MA-based Lux Research has released the ‘Resource intelligence for system knowledge’ (Risk) platform, a tool that helps companies understand and manage dependence on critical natural resources. According to Lux, companies with complex supply chains can be exposed to unexpected risks and/or miss valuable opportunities due to their dependence on natural resources. Resource scarcity, price volatility, and increased social and environmental pressure all threaten supply disruption and unplanned price spikes. But for many, the impact of resource dependence remains hard to evaluate.
Risk integrates more than 200 data sources on subjects like land use, water needs, and energy into a decision-support system to visualize value chains in a geospatial context. Lux VP analytics Ory Zik said, ‘Natural resource dependence is one of the biggest risks that companies face. Risk helps benchmark operations from the perspectives of profitability, resilience and sustainability. The toolset shows where substitution strategies can be implemented and suggests where innovation will have the most impact.’
Zik told Oil IT Journal, ‘One application of the platform is to analyze energy as a supply chain and to understand exposure to coal and carbon emission. Our team of data scientists has built a spatial-temporal, dynamic network topology to analyze the entire North American electric grid.’