With the wealth of data available to manufacturing companies, it makes sense to harness that data into a business intelligence (BI) platform. When the massive amounts of data is gathered in real-time from various departments including accounting, sales, inventory and purchasing, intelligent decisions can be made with confidence. With the right manufacturing software this critical real-time information can be displayed visually to decision making managers. Let’s have a closer look at challenges facing manufacturers and how BI tools can help to resolve issues and improve production.
Shop Floor Management
When data is visually available in real-time the shop floor can monitor at what stage production is in and will be alerted immediately with critical issues. Quick decisions can be made regarding quality issues, performance and inventory. It’s easy to identify at which production centers does work-in-progress accumulate. How do lead-times and production-times compare to competitors? OEE metrics are valuable in understanding the effectiveness of each of your workers, product and operations.
You can easily see how production runs can be optimized and higher product quality achieved with the right BI software.
Planning and MRP
Business Intelligence can be used to drill down into your operational data and discover important analytics, KPI’s and alerts. This information can be used in your production planning to manage raw materials, resources and maintenance of each machine. You can be confident that your plans created from this real-time data will meet your production targets.
Manage Inventory
By pulling together data based on historical purchases, safety-stock-levels and out-of-stock situations, BI can provide critical decision making information. Decisions can be made to reduce over-stock situations and out-of-supply scenarios. Long lead-times can be identified which is important for ‘just in time’ or ‘on time in full’ requirements.
Purchasing orders and receipts can be monitored to have a tighter control over inventory and what’s presently in the warehouse.
Manufacturers are increasingly turning to software to analyze their big data. If you need persuasion or do not still understand the benefits, consider these statistics. Recent studies have indicated that 68% of surveyed manufacturers are currently investing in data analytics and 15% are ahead of the curve.
You can review more on these topics to discover how Business Intelligence can improve your business by signing up now.
You can review more on these topics to discover how Business Intelligence can improve your business by signing up now.
