How Manufacturing Intelligence Leads to More-Informed Decisions

Analytics and business intelligence (BI) give manufacturers the ability to break down the silos that separate departments, divisions, and processes, and galvanize their business around customers. Here are just a few ways manufacturing intelligence breaks down silos and leads to more-informed decisions.

Creating One Version of Reality

Too often there are hundreds—and in larger manufacturers, thousands—of dashboards and scorecards that often are based on different databases or legacy, homegrown and on-premise ERP systems. It’s time for manufacturers to move beyond contradicting, disconnected analytics-reporting platforms to a single system of record. Cloud-based ERP analytics can deliver this today, reflecting reality instead of what legacy systems produce.

Driving Improved Financial Performance

How each improvement made over time on the shop floor contributes to improved financial performance is elusive and very difficult to achieve with legacy, homegrown ERP systems. Cloud-based ERP analytics have the ability to bridge the data gap between the plant floor and top floor, giving senior management clear visibility into how the accumulated improvement in production improves profits.

Reducing Time to Market

Manufacturers are constantly under pressure to squeeze more time and costs out of their new product development processes. Streamlining the new product development process using cloud-based analytics brings in the voice of the customer.

Making Compliance a Competitive Advantage

Compliance to stringent requirements is considered problematic and costly by a majority of manufacturers, but there is an opportunity to use them as a catalyst for greater competitive strength. Specifically, the ISO 9000 standard (section 8.2) states that systems must be in place dedicated to ongoing measurement and analysis of customer satisfaction, quality management internal audit results, and continual monitoring and analysis of metrics related to product characteristics and attributes. Using compliance to this standard as a competitive advantage around quality puts you ahead of competition that doesn’t focus on compliance in this way.

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