15 July 2019 – Global engineering, design and advisory company Aurecon has announced a significant investment in artificial intelligence company ELARA that has developed ground-breaking technology to help businesses of all structures and sizes maximise profit.

The partnership is part of Aurecon’s continued push to digitise infrastructure following their recent acquisition of Quartile One, a 70-person global asset management business, which uses data analytics to unlock value for physical and other infrastructure assets.

Developed from a Quartile One R&D initiative, ELARA is an artificial intelligence platform that connects to an organisation’s existing digital systems, analysing all data to inform better decisions to enhance profit and cash-flow

Aurecon Chief Digital Officer and ELARA director, Dr Andrew Maher, said Aurecon’s investment reinforced the company’s focus and pursuit of opportunities to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning into digital engineering as part of the organisation’s broader advisory practice.

“ELARA is at the forefront of AI technology and we are very impressed with its capabilities. The software is creating incredible opportunities for companies to firstly identify and then fully maximise their business operations and opportunities to turn a profit,” said Dr Maher.

“The partnership will further support other initiatives we have at Aurecon that focus on building a company’s digital profile of existing and real-time asset behaviour, which can be used to optimise performance. We see tremendous potential in this space and are very keen to support ELARA’s launch into the market.”

Founder and CEO of ELARA, Campbell Morrison, said his multi-year extensive research in this area had found the quality and context of decision-making was the key differentiator in performance for any kind of business.

“Businesses of all structures and sizes suffer from sub-optimal decisions due to an abundance of data, yet lack the context required to make sense of complexities that impact profit. Many businesses also operate in silos that can reduce accountability for decision-making,” explained Mr Morrison.

“These factors result in wasted profit and cash-flow opportunities and ELARA is designed to help businesses leverage data to increase profit. Many businesses do not understand the true driver behind profit, so ELARA helps ask what does your profit opportunity actually look like and what could drive improvements? Importantly, it also helps businesses understand what their risk trade-off is,” he added.

How does ELARA work?

ELARA software connects to an organisation’s existing digital systems, analysing data spanning the finance, human resources, sales, procurement, operations and logistics fields. With this information, an economic digital twin (replica model) of the business is created by ELARA to understand and identify the drivers of predicted business profit and risk.

The model is then used to conduct real-time experiments on the business (implemented rapidly through AI software), testing different scenarios as new organisational data is created to see how changing inputs can improve outcomes for the business. Implementations of the ELARA platform use the results of its continual experiments to provide recommendations about decisions before they are taken.

ELARA has been applied in businesses across Australia’s retail, hospitality, resources and service industries, helping organisations achieve increases in revenue and cost savings by better prediction of demand and performance, labour requirements, ordering, and optimising promotions based on customer demand and internal efficiencies.

For more information about ELARA visit here.