Phil Bishop
Data and Analytics Manager at Fortescue Zero
“WE WORK ON HARD, IMPORTANT PROBLEMS – AND WE’RE GOING TO SOLVE THEM VERY FAST.”
From achieving a master’s in aerospace engineering to supporting motorsports teams that have won ten World Championships and two European Championships, Phil Bishop’s career so far has taken him from the nuts and bolts of engineering through to fronting a team of data specialists at Fortescue Zero, formerly known as Williams Advanced Engineering.
As part of the wider Fortescue group, Fortescue Zero are undertaking innovative work creating solutions to drive a zero emissions future for their business while also delivering nextgeneration, customer-facing products.
We caught up with Phil to talk about the similarities – if any – between using data to help drive battery performance in motorsport versus in autonomous heavy vehicles, the integration of data in the green energy transition and what he thinks the future of mobility and energy storage may look like.
ROUTE TO THE ROLE
Like many who’ve risen up the ranks to lead a data function, Phil’s journey to his current position was interestingly indirect.
After his studies, Phil went straight into aerodynamics engineering and then onto a role with Williams Advanced Engineering where his job was to do one important thing: make the racing car go fast.
Doing that required data – and lots of it. The small team Phil was part of were taking reams of data and trying to bring it together to compare to support them with making the best decision to improve the speed of the racing car.
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With Excel sheets flying around, the team realised they needed a data warehouse to consolidate the information and to make sure every hour that they spent working on the project counted towards their goal, rather than being wasted on admin. This is where Phil’s data journey began – through necessity.
Following the completion of these projects, Phil went onto a secondment in the design engineering team to help improve efficiency there by applying his learnings, resulting in a huge efficiency drive that freed up many people to focus on value add. With these successes in mind, Phil proactively paved the way to developing a more formal data function. In 2022, he went to his Chief Operating Officer with a business case and a plan, the gist of which was, as Phil explained,
“We can apply all of this great motorsport analysis and understanding of how to make decisions in high pressure scenarios and apply this across the wider business.”
leadership team said yes.
“Ever since then we’ve been working towards that goal of helping the business have the right information at the right time available for the right decision,” Phil told us.
A business team that does tech Under Phils’ leadership, the data team at Fortescue Zero has earned a reputation for taking on hard problems and helping business teams deliver. He shared his approach, “I very much want to always be in co-creation mode. As a data team we are a facilitator – we’re helping the business lead itself. We want to be everyone's preferred partner.
“We’re firmly a business team that does tech. The ambition is that we are living through the same challenges and opportunities as the business, and we want to be very close to feel that and help move them forward.”
With the data team having proved their value and embedded into the business, they’re now looking at bigger, more ambitious projects that work with the pivot of the business from consultancy to manufacturing products.
As Phil explained, “The business is changing and growing, so we’re moving and adapting fast. We work in very short time spans. We’re aiming to constantly deliver small pieces of value and drip feed that through the business because, if it took us six months to do something, the business would have moved on.”
When moving fast having access to flexible resources has been key to our success, that’s where MIGSO-PCUBED have helped. Providing business analysts and data specialists to accelerate the delivery of projects has enabled us to make improvements quickly where it matters.
The
PHIL
LEVERAGING DATA IN INNOVATION
Something there’s no shortage of at Fortescue Zero is innovation. Or data. Phil shared, “As engineers and as people who are developing products, we work very iteratively through a process of build, test, learn, evolve, so a great product doesn't happen the first time, it happens the thousandth time.
“Whether we recognise it explicitly or not, using data to make decisions day-onday is what we do in the business. From the delivery of engineering, to sourcing for our supply chain, to working with our logistics partners, to how we're going to manufacture the product, we're constantly seeking data and trying to make sense of it to drive the business. My role is to try to make that as seamless as possible.”
How does that work in practice, we wondered? Phil continued, “An example is how through our R&D process we’re learning from the simulations and tests. We're currently at the early phases of looking at how we can bring all that information together not just within projects, but how do we share it around and accelerate innovation as a whole. That then gives us the potential to do some more advanced things with analytics to develop products.”
“I think we've got a lot of use cases in the business for advanced analytics and AI, and they’re particularly championed in our motorsport industry team where those applications are really powerful.”
Their challenge is how do they then take that capability and use cases and scale that capability out across the business. Well, the team at Fortescue Zero already has already achieved this with Elysia® Battery Intelligence, which is a software battery management system. By combining their best-in-class AI, electrochemistry and real-world battery systems experience and applying advanced analytics, Elysia®
has been elevated into its own customer-facing product.
This means Elysia® can bring Fortescue Zero’s expertise, having operated at the forefront of electrification for over a decade, to every battery on the planet.
Phil shared what this product delivers, “The outcome of Elysia® is really powerful –what it means for batteries is that we can improve the life, increase their performance, and enhance their safety."
In May 2024, Fortescue Zero announced a new partnership with JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) to use Elysia® on all their electric vehicles, starting with the new Land Rover fleet, so their customers will soon be able to experience the power of Elysia® for themselves.
With the team having such a large range of projects they’re working on, being able to seamlessly move data from source to presentation so the correct data is in front of the right people is key, Phil told us.
Their orchestration and ingestion provider is Kleene.
Ai and, as Phil’s team is trying to create trust that information they share is up to date and be transparent when it's not, they’re finding that being able to add flags and filters to indicate this is supporting them to create a culture of trust.
Phil noted, “ This allows people to have more confidence, which allows us to become data-driven, so this technology is really key to that. If you can't use the technology to demonstrate that transparency, how do you get that trust otherwise?”
DATA IN THE SPECIALIST WORLD OF MOTORSPORT MANUFACTURING
Phil has mentioned how fast-moving the business is, but some of their clients are particularly fast moving too. As we referenced a little earlier, Williams Advanced Engineering is now called Fortescue Zero, but the connection of the previous Williams name to motorsport will be present in many minds.
In the highly competitive world of motorsport and the specialist manufacture that goes into making a car perform, data and analytics clearly have a huge part to play.
Phil and his team have worked hard on joining the value chain end-to-end, from engineering to supply chain to logistics to manufacturing. And in low-volume, high-performance manufacturing, everything goes back to engineering.
Phil explained how this works in practice. “Because everything we do is under quite aggressive timelines, we're always working from how long we can give our engineers to do the best possible job, and then how long do we need for the supply chain and the logistics, and then how long do we need on manufacture to make sure we deliver what we need to on time, to cost, to quality.”
To make those decisions, data and analytics are vital and valuable for providing clarity –and for making more confident decisions more accurately. It’s enabled the business to go from having around three people on an individual project spending time working this out, to having data and analytics embedded and happening in the ordinary way of working.
Again, co-creation is important here. The data team don’t go in with a polished solution, they go to the business teams with a rough prototype and work together to refine it.
Phil pointed out, “Data and analytics isn't the job of the data and analytics team, it’s the job of the business. We’re there to accelerate and facilitate, and where needed we lead and guide, but we don't own the data, we don't own the decisions.”
Currently, there’s also work being done with Fortescue’s quality team on proof of concept around whether they can understand if quality issues are present earlier. Phil summarised this for us, “Can we use advanced analytics and predictive modelling to take huge datasets and spot a trend you can’t see as a human, and then how accurate are we predicting that? This will save us money, save us time, and help make sure our products are the best they can be.”
FROM RACING CARS TO AUTONOMOUS TRUCKS
It’s not all about motorsport for Phil and his team. Parent company Fortescue is a mining operation which include rail, energy and mining. And that means the Fortescue Zero data function has to consider this too.
With a remit that’s business wide, how possible it is for the data team to transfer knowledge from vehicles as varied as a racing car to a mining truck? This may seem like a theoretical question, but for Fortescue Zero, it’s not.
First off, let’s get into a bit of background on the motorsport side of thigs. Williams Advanced Engineering had previously designed, tested and manufactured batteries to power the first electric single seater championship for Formula E, and Fortescue Zero is also manufacturing the Gen 3 Formula E battery. The Gen 1 battery provided 99.8% reliability out of 440 starts during the first four Formula E season, delivering 200kW peak power.
A key component in battery energy conversion and charging is DC-to-DC technology. Phil explained, “Our deep knowledge of this started off in motorsport for a niche, high-speed charging application. We’re now taking that same technology and applying it at a much larger scale to how we charge and
make sure energy is available to power this huge heavyindustry mining equipment.”
In this case the equipment is an autonomous battery electric haulage truck which pulls a 300-tonne payload mine vehicle that Fortescue is developing with Liebherr. The truck moves iron ore from Fortescue’s mine site to the train, where it will continue its journey.
Phil shared how data can act as a bridge between these two seemingly different batteries, “I think when we're talking about data, it's not really the ones and zeros – the numbers, the storage – it's ‘What is the information that helps us understand the opportunities and the challenges that we have?’
“If you take that lens rather than a technical lens, your perspective changes so that you start to view the electric racing car batteries we develop and the batteries we’re developing for a 300-tonne electric mining truck in a very similar way.
“They're both extremely high-performance batteries for their application. How they use information to balance trade-offs and decisions based on power or mass is on a spectrum, and that's where the learnings come in.
“We can get those comparisons up and we can then start to understand how similar or how different they are. So, at that
level, that’s where that bridge is made because you can talk about those things in the same breath.”
Phil pointed out, “You can only do that when you look at the spectrum of the challenges and the opportunities on that parity. Otherwise, you’d think there’s no crossover here’.
While there’s no magic formula to applying data across sectors, having a data literate workforce such as the one at Fortescue helps to join things up.
USING DATA TO CUT CARBON
This joining together of different business areas is becoming even more important as Fortescue is on a journey towards achieve carbon zero in the not-too-distant future: by 2030.
Fortescue has an action plan for turning their science-based target into industrial delivery – and it’s already underway. The business is going to stop burning fossil fuels across all their operations, including their Australian iron ore
operation, without voluntary carbon offsets and without carbon capture and storage. They’re calling this Real Zero.
We wanted to know how this would work in practice. Phil shared, “Almost all of our group’s emissions come from our mining operations. So first, our focus is on using data to support development of carbon-zero products such as mining vehicles, dozers, graders and a battery electric locomotive to take iron ore from the mine site to port, plus hydrogen conversion on ships. This is where the most significant contributions are going to be felt.
“To give you an idea of impact, delivering our products will save 700 million litres of diesel per year.”
So, what role is data playing in this? “We’re very much tying in with our cross functional teams who are responsible for delivering these products to really be able to help them on this journey,” Phil answered.
“Data is really important in this, helping to make sure we have a common understanding
helps ensure we don't get caught in decision paralysis due to conflicting information and that we know enough to act.”
“A big part of the culture here is that we work on hard, important problems and we’re going to solve them very fast it. It’s maybe not your typical 9:00 to 5:00”
A VISION FOR THE FUTURE
While looking to what’s next, we wanted to get Phil’s take on what the future of mobility and energy storage might look like.
Phil was excited to reflect on this. “I think this is a really pivotal time for mobility and energy storage. So far, the focus has really been on hardware and infrastructure but those problems those things are now starting to be solved, but the challenge then becomes different.
“Having these energy storage and mobility systems based on fossil fuels compared to clean energy is fundamentally different because with fossil fuels, you can quite quickly increase and decrease capacity to match demand, whereas that’s much more difficult with clean or green energy.”
“The role of data analytics in this space is huge because you're now looking over an ecosystem in a very different way, and you're starting to see things connected which wouldn't traditionally be.”
“To give you an idea of impact, delivering our products will save 700 million litres of diesel per year.”
Phil suggested that in future, green energy generation, storage and distribution may not be discrete pieces of a puzzle but something to be considered together. And that key factors such as how to move energy around, ensure availability and be clever with energy storage are almost too big to comprehend without considering a more analyticsbased approach.
He illustrated this point with something very pertinent to Fortescue: mine sites. “If you imagine a mine site, they might have their own solar farms, wind turbines, and hydrogen power plants and their own storage. However, mine sites are 24-hour operations, meaning the autonomous trucks are going to be working all the time, so they’ll need to charge and go. Ensuring that we've got the energy available in this ecosystem in the right place at the right time is key to making sure these can continue to deliver.”
“I think that will also transition to general life as we move to a greener grid and infrastructure. For example, you're going to want to charge a car battery overnight so you can go to work in the morning, but there's not going to be any solar energy at night, and wind energy is responsive to weather conditions to a large part, so how do you make sure you can manage this in an effective way?
“You can't consider these things in isolation, and I think it will lead to some really exciting innovation over the next 20 years.
“In the mobility space, you might see a company shift to fundamentally different way of considering mobility. We have a really great opportunity using technology to do it in a responsible, sustainable effective way and I think it's going to be exciting.”
So, what tech does Phil envision will be the key enables for this change? “I think big data, data sharing, machine learning and AI are going to enable decarbonising in an effective way while maintaining quality of life. Without them, such things would not be a possibility.”
“And I think for that vision to work, how we share and democratise or monetise data is going to be a really interesting evolution. If businesses stay in the traditional format of today, I think you will be looking at really close collaboration between different industries and different functions.”
With Phil leading Fortescue Zero’s data team and the innovative products they’re helping to deliver, we can’t wait to see how their business continues to evolve. It’s one to watch.
