The Data-Driven Factory: Leveraging Business Intelligence for Manufacturing Excellence

Having reliable and up-to-date data by using business intelligence tools is essential to optimize production, quality and profitability. A lack of data, duplicate or outdated information can lead to significant problems. Planning errors, delivery delays, excessive or insufficient stocks, loss of raw materials or finished products, poor customer satisfaction… These problems can affect the performance of your company, as well as its ability to innovate and adapt to market changes. These can be solved with a business intelligence software.

The Benefits

Business intelligence is the set of tools and methods that make it possible to collect, analyze and present relevant data for decision-making.

Business intelligence can help a manufacturing company like yours to improve its operational efficiency, that is, its ability to produce more, better and cheaper. How? By giving you access to strategic information that allows you, among other things:

• to optimize your value chain,
• to reduce your waste,
• to strengthen your quality,
• to adapt to fluctuations in demand,
• to build customer loyalty,
• to differentiate you from your competitors.

In short, business intelligence can be a real lever for performance and competitiveness when properly implemented.

The Four Pillars of Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is based on four pillars: data, technologies, methods and people. Let’s look at them one by one.

Data is the raw material of business intelligence. They come from internal sources (information systems, connected machines, sensors, etc.) or external sources (market, customers, suppliers, etc.). It can be structured (numbers, dates, etc.) or unstructured (texts, images, etc.). They must be collected, stored, cleaned and integrated into a data warehouse.

Technologies are the tools that allow data to be processed and used. They include specialized software for data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), database management systems (DBMS), analytical platforms (BI), visualization solutions (dashboards, reports …), business analytics applications (statistics, modeling, etc.), or even artificial intelligence tools (machine learning, deep learning, etc.).

Methods are the approaches that allow business intelligence projects to be defined and managed. They include phases such as needs analysis, data model design, choice of key performance indicators (KPIs), implementation of technical solutions, deployment and maintenance of the business intelligence system.

People are the actors who participate in business intelligence projects. They include varied profiles such as executives, operational managers, business experts, technical experts (IT specialists), or even analysts.

How ALIX Can Help You Make Better Decisions

By working with ALIX, your data collection is carried out in real time for all key transactions and operations in your business such as sales, purchasing, production, quality, etc. This data can then be interpreted using business intelligence to obtain the benefits mentioned above.

In the Dashboards module, the data collected is transformed into analytics that provide you with the necessary business information to enable decision-making. At Agilean, we recommend Zoho Analytics software. The latter can be easily integrated into the ALIX Dashboards module, which means that you can consult your analysis reports directly in ALIX. Please note that it is also possible to integrate several other tools into this module in order to centralize all the information in the same place.

To learn more, visit the Dashboard Management page.

In conclusion

As you will have understood, business intelligence is a major asset for optimizing your operational performance. Without relevant data about your activities, and clear and accurate reports to help you analyze them, it is very difficult to make the right decisions. If you would like to know more about this topic, do not hesitate to contact us or visit our website.