As the sounds of spring echo through the offices here at Continuum Industries, it’s time for our Spring Feature Release and it’s jam-packed with exciting updates for our AI-powered infrastructure planning tool, Optioneer. We have so many new features to talk about, we’re breaking the news down into three key areas: 

• Optimise decision-making with data-driven insights.
• Streamline project planning and compliance.
• Improve clarity and consensus with advanced visualisation tools.

In this post, we’ll look at the new product features that maximise your ability to gain insights from data quickly and help optimise your decision-making.

Turn your project data into actionable insights

The new ‘Custom Metrics’ tool is a built-in, highly customisable calculator inside Optioneer that allows you to perform nuanced analyses directly within the platform. These analyses can be project-specific, allowing you to run impact analyses on cost, biodiversity and CO₂ and output reports to meet the requirements of internal stakeholders.

You can also create, save and reuse complex calculations, including red-amber-green (RAG) assessments and qualitative analyses. So, if your team would like to standardise their approach and replicate a set of calculations across future projects, it’s easy to achieve in a couple of clicks.
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With the power of the ‘Custom Metrics’ tool at your fingertips, going from raw data to actionable insight is fast, accurate and removes the need to switch to Excel for this kind of analysis.

Why is this a game-changer?

• Precise data analysis: Enables detailed analyses for more informed decision-making and advanced reporting.
• Workflow streamlining: Minimises context-switching to external applications like Excel, enhancing user efficiency. 
• Standardisation across projects: Provides a unified approach to analysis, accelerating the ramp-up for new projects and standardising cross-project analyses and reporting.

Instantly pinpoint project risks with automated colour-coded metric assessments

Optioneer's new red-amber-green (RAG) categorisation feature makes it easier to evaluate metrics quickly by automatically assigning a red, amber, or green status to each metric based on predefined criteria.

The RAG system uses a classic traffic light system to indicate risk levels where red indicates significant risk, amber moderate risk, and green minimal risk. The automated categorisation simplifies the assessment process, allowing users to see at a glance where risk is highest or lowest for each metric.

Designed for cross-project applicability, the pre-defined criteria for each metric, which dictate the RAG colour coding, can be standardised across projects.

A simple system with big impact, the RAG feature uses straightforward logic and numerical analysis to convert quantitative data into easily interpretable insights which can be closely aligned with your organisation's internal requirements.

 Why is this a game-changer?

• Improved metric clarity: Automated colour-coded categorisation streamlines decision-making by giving a fast and visual understanding of per-metric risks.
• Risk identification: Easily identify significant risks and the appropriate action to mitigate them.
• Stakeholder communication: Improve stakeholder engagement with universally understood visual indicators.

Streamline reporting and compliance with the Automated Reporting Tool

The automated reporting tool allows you to create, analyse and save a list of impacted environmental receptors quickly. This makes it easy to decide whether to investigate potential sites further and to identify stakeholders you may need to contact. The automated list also creates outputs for impact reports, EIA chapters, or permit applications, accelerating and simplifying your reporting workflows.
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Why is this a game-changer?

• Automated reporting: Automates the generation of reporting outputs for internal governance, permitting requirements, and environmental impact assessments. Reports automatically update to reflect any project changes.
• Data-driven decisions: Leverages comprehensive, accurate data to underpin decisions, leading to more reliable project outcomes.‍
• Error minimisation: Significantly reduces the likelihood of user error, keeping information accurate and trustworthy.

With the power of automation, Optioneer’s ability to process large volumes of information and display intuitively comprehensible visualisations of the results means you and your team can make decisions quickly. Whether you decide more investigation in the field is needed, or to move ahead, you can be confident that your decisions are based on robust data and the exact analyses your organisation requires.

Once your preferred process is established in Optioneer, you and your team can take advantage of huge gains by rolling your standardised approach into future projects, ratcheting down the time needed to reach your optimal solution on each new project. 

Check back in a week for our next post, when we’ll discuss how some of our new spring release features can help streamline project planning and compliance. 

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