David Todd, global head of data and analytics, Meggitt Aerospace

What has been your path to power?

The importance of data has always fascinated me and my background in programming gave me a good understanding of why (especially the data quality elements). As my career developed, I moved steadily away from the detailed technical aspects and started to become more aware of how data could be exploited to drive business value and benefit through business intelligence. I grew a perception of how data can help drive success and is essential for the whole of a business. (It’s not just an IT thing!). 

Moving between some very large retail businesses, I grew my awareness and understanding of data across a multi-channel environment with a focus on e-commerce and supply chain. My experience of the end-to-end business processes and understanding of data and technology then helped me to drive a number of data and analytics transformations, bringing a data-driven approach into the forefront of decision-making. 

Most recently I moved into the manufacturing sector, specifically aerospace, which has opened up a world of interesting opportunities for me to use data in order to drive process improvements, identify operational efficiencies and streamline customer opportunities.

What impact has the pandemic had on the role of data in your company/organisation?

The pandemic has had a big impact on many industries, but aerospace has had one of the biggest hits. Borders were closed as lockdowns were implemented and a huge proportion of daily flights were cancelled as aircraft were grounded. Orders for spare parts subsequently started to drop and some orders for new aircraft were cancelled or put on hold, impacting our sales order flow. 

The business needed to know what was happening to orders, production and finance on a day-by-day basis, much more regularly than they knew they needed before. Demand for data across the business suddenly increased and also started to expose the known issues and holes in our legacy reporting suites. Luckily, the projects needed to upgrade our data solutions had already been drafted and were expedited to help meet the growing requirements. Data is now playing a much bigger part in key discussions and decisions across the business with reporting automation being a big driver.