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Michael Souder

Michael Souder, Director of Data Science, Brambles Digital

Describe your career to date

Coming out of grad school, I worked in aerospace carrying out modeling and simulation for satellite programs, from link budgets to optimal orbits. At one point, I did a simulation of shooting a comet with a gigantic laser.  Turns out we’d need a pretty big laser. But about seven years ago, I switched to doing data science for Brambles, going from outer space to the backbone of the supply chain: the pallet. Now I develop algorithms and models that describe the flow of hundreds of millions of assets worldwide and get to think of ways to fundamentally change how this company does business.   

 

My own capabilities have grown and evolved alongside the digital elements of the company. When we only had a handful of tracking devices, my simple python algorithms could interpret the data, remove outliers and generate useful journeys. But as we’ve scaled up, we’ve embraced parallel computing and are now even moving past that, utilizing real-time streaming applications. One day I got to explore exactly how many BLE beacons you could have in a warehouse before they jammed each other’s transmissions, and the next we were granted a patent for applying facial and fingerprint recognition neural nets to recognizing the wood grain and nail patterns in the boards of our pallets. 

 

As I take on more responsibility in the company, I have just as much fun guiding the business in their approach to data as on the many projects I oversee. 

What stage has your organization reached on its data maturity journey?

When I first joined Brambles about seven years ago, it was just embarking on its digital transformation. Now we collect data from more than a quarter million IOT devices, processing it in real time so we can generate valuable insights for ourselves and our customers. As a typically industrial company, Brambles has still made great strides in its data maturity. Smaller teams within the IT organization have split off and grown to handle things from governance to security and privacy. 

 

Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for

Across Brambles Digital, we now have approximately 200 data and analytics personnel, the large majority of which have joined in the last 18 months, and I’ve been one of the senior leaders as part of the original core team from the start. We are globally dispersed across 11 countries, range in seniority from CEO-2 to entry level and are a diverse bunch in terms of background, experience and area of specialism. Currently, I formally manage a team of 15 consisting mainly of data scientists, but we’ve sprinkled in some software developers, dev ops engineers and test engineers. We focus on data science applications at the edge, be it interpreting data from our tracking devices to developing convolutional neural nets in our CV systems in our service centers. 

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your organization and on the industry as a whole? 

As companies become more conscious about their data, pesky little things like security and privacy, which might have been lax before, will become very important. Gone are the days where it was easy for a data scientist to pull all the company’s financial data onto her laptop to run a forecast, and rightfully so. Though this type of security will initially seem like a burden, it is a much better burden to carry than that of a stolen laptop filled with sensitive business information. All typically industrial companies looking to embrace digital will have to implement data governance, literacy, security and privacy programs to be successful. 

 

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organization or just the data function?

Working with the leadership of the company, I hope we can fundamentally transform how we do business, collecting the data we need in a different way that reduces friction with our customers while also improving accuracy and unlocking insights that lead to greater efficiency. 

 

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organization, particularly with regard to data quality?

For years the business has run successfully on aggregated data. As we are able to measure things at a more granular level, we are better able to see where we have issues with data quality. With a stronger data foundation, we can be more efficient and provide better service to our customers. 

Michael Souder
Michael Souder
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2023 (USA)

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