Business Intelligence For Manufacturing Industry-Convert Data Into Business Insights

Globally, manufacturing systems collect operational data in a high volume due to a long chain of manufacturing operations ranging from shop floor and sales to delivery to customers. Without the right data analytics tool, analyzing and extracting valuable information from tons of data is a difficult challenge for the employees themselves. To fill in this gap, leading manufacturing enterprises are leveraging Business Intelligence (BI) Tools to convert the abundant data into business insights and make data-driven decisions. Without digging valuable information from complicated reports and spreadsheets, the BI application can predict the future, like monthly delivery requirements, holistic operational data view, expected consumer trends, etc.

Today, the majority of manufacturing firms are interested in investing the BI systems as it allows business professionals at all levels of an organization to access, interact with, and analyze data to manage the business, discover opportunities, improve performance, and operate efficiently.

7 Key Manufacturing Challenges that BI Can Solve

Manufacturing businesses can benefit from Business Intelligence by addressing the following challenges:

Order Prioritization

Without real-time information, the whole production process remains invisible to other departments like operations. Due to lack of visibility, the priority of the orders in accordance with their delivery schedule cannot be monitored and carried out. It results in delays in the delivery of priority orders. As the BI application allows employees at all levels of an organization to access, share, and update data, it becomes easier to collaborate with cross-functional teams and knows the status of the orders without visiting the shop floor.

Wrong Assumption of Capacity

Due to manual forms, unstructured and disintegrated data, and limited information visualizations, many manufacturing companies struggle with estimating the right manufacturing capacity. The existing systems like ERP, MES, and SCM are lacking analytical and historical data aggregation features which are needed for an organization to optimize business processes and capacity. The BI Tools can help you overcome these problems with their predictive analysis and performance measurement capabilities. It presents information visually to give the intended users clear guidance for an accurate and fast decision-making process.

Low Production Output

Due to no real-time response-ability to manufacturing disruptions and demand changes, it becomes an issue to match the production with future demands. It not only leads to low production but also increasing inventory cost. Today, organizations are impelled to adapt agility to respond to customers’ demands in the most effective way. With its advanced analytics capabilities, the Business Intelligence helps you foresee the demand pattern and schedule the level of production accordingly.

Inventory Management

Inefficient and error-prone manual stock checks result in mistakes, shortages, excess, and unidentified losses. BI platforms can help you to accurately plan and optimize your inventory based on historical sales, point-of-sale, turnover, shipment, trends in inventory and other performance parameters. By controlling your inventory, you can better manage inventory levels while avoiding out-of-stock scenarios.

Difficulty To Predict Sales, Production, And Distribution

For a manufacturing business, forecasting sales is vital, since other activities like production and distribution schedules depend on it. Generally, managers spend hours with Excel spreadsheets or rely on their judgment for sales prediction which is not the right method. The BI Tools provide you with historical, real-time, and future projection data to improve forecasting accuracy. Hence, you can leverage the advanced Power BI solution to plan production schedules according to the customers’ demands.

Integrating Different Data Sources

As manufacturing involves a long chain of operations, there are many internal and external data sources generating the data. The siloed and misaligned data results in poor quality data with many duplicates always. Business Intelligence as a self-service analytics tool assists you in retrieving data from these disparate sources and merging it together to create a single, unified view of your business. It helps you in uncovering business insights to derive innovations and efficiency.

Create Daily Reports And Process Analysis

Manufacturing businesses that depend on excel sheets or disintegrated data sources spend hours preparing daily reports. It also results in inaccurate analysis giving wrong information. BI applications help you increase business performance by integrating complete data sources including machine and production that can be analyzed for sales, forecasting, production, planning, order tracking, profit margin, and reporting.

Wrap Up

Nowadays, Business Intelligence has been widely used in the manufacturing industry across countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, which are manufacturing hubs, to solve organizational challenges by converting crucial data into business insights and making data-driven decisions to maintain the company’s competitiveness. BI Solutions Companies like Eastern Software Systems help you establish a BI framework, focusing on the visual representation of data that shows the performance of your business. Besides, providing the mobile app for remote accessibility, our BI consultants help you integrating existing/legacy manufacturing systems with BI tools successfully and derive your business with profitability.