August 31, 2023
Manufacturing is one of the most data-intensive industries, requiring powerful analytical tools. Business intelligence helps manufacturing companies process enormous data volumes and derive valuable insights to improve operations and outpace competitors. Therefore, BI implementation has become a top priority for multiple manufacturing businesses.
This overview covers the most common manufacturing BI use cases and serves as a guide for companies looking for the optimal technology options and best practices for their BI project.
Table of contents
Manufacturers use BI tools to collect and analyze current and historical plant floor data to:
Manufacturing BI solutions come with a collection of tools that integrate, manage, and analyze production data coming from various data sources and heterogenous data structures. Here, we outline the key features of BI solutions manufacturing enterprises would benefit from.
Consolidated data ready for analysis and reporting should be kept in a structured storage - an enterprise data warehouse. The data warehouse is the best option to store aggregated historical data in a highly-structured format. This central data storage can also be complemented with an operational data store that contains current data for ad-hoc reporting and dimensional data marts built specifically for particular user groups.
Analytics capabilities of the BI solution are dictated by the specific business needs and objectives of a manufacturing company. Traditionally, BI software supports descriptive and diagnostic analysis. However, as the analytics maturity among companies is increasing, modern BI solutions can provide ML-driven predictive analytics and recommendations, real-time production data analysis down to the IoT-generated data level, augmented data analytics for non-tech users, and much more.
There are multiple choices for delivering BI content to end-users. These can include standard reports published on a schedule, a highly interactive interface of a self-service BI tool that empowers end users to query data, build reports, and share dashboards, or web portals and corporate applications with embedded BI content.
To import and analyze data and deliver actionable business insights, manufacturing BI software can be integrated with the whole manufacturing operations management ecosystem as well as other corporate applications and data sources. Among the most common integration are:
Business intelligence enables complete transparency of the company’s operations and performance, advancing data-driven decision-making. As a result, BI implementation brings multiple benefits across all functional areas of the manufacturing company.Â
Analytics insights derived with the BI software are not trustworthy and reliable because of the poor data quality.
End users continue using familiar tools, neglecting the rich functionality of manufacturing BI software.
Manufacturers connect and share BI content with many external stakeholders as well as access data from mobile devices, which can compromise data security.
Manufacturers generate enormous volumes of data, and business intelligence is one of the few tools able to quickly and accurately process it, helping companies make informed business decisions that lead to tangible improvements. Besides helping manufacturers with persistent problems, business intelligence solutions also uncover previously unknown issues, such as product families yielding lower margins or suppliers disrupting production. If you want to achieve complete analytics and reporting transparency and understand how to improve your bottom line, feel free to reach out to Itransition’s BI consultants for advisory and development support. Â