Business Objects Manufacturing Industry Solutions

BusinessObjects users in manufacturing are using business intelligence (BI) solutions to streamline the flow of information across the organisation and throughout the supply chain to reduce cycle and manufacturing times and adapt quickly to market changes.

Business Intelligence (BI) helps companies in the manufacturing industry by increasing their ability to:

• Identify the value of customer orders and relationships
• Respond quickly to changing markets
• Accelerate new products to market
• Reduce inventory investment
• Improve planning, scheduling and procurement
• Maintain and develop quality assurance
• Select and apply world-class technologies

Agile manufacturing enterprises cultivate a responsive environment and continually focus on improvements in lead time, product quality, and lower production costs.

Business Intelligence (BI) Reporting & Analytics software is adopted at:

Strategic levels to align goals with capability part of their strategic approach to attaining their goals. across the organization and through the supply chain to reduce cycle and manufacturing times and adapt quickly to market changes.

Operational levels - sharing enabling information across operational functions: product development, quality control, supply management and logistics [shipping and distribution]

SMB manufacturers are less likely to invest in technology needed to fully automate their business processes. This is largely due to the geographically dispersed manufacturing operations common today.

However, timely receipt and distribution of information and documents can greatly improve the efficiency of processes, reducing approval cycles and decreasing time to market.

Distributed capture of business-critical documents as soon as it is received at remote locations, enables the relevant business data to be immediately routed into the appropriate system or business process.

Distributed capture also ensures documents are under organizational control by managing them in a repository, facilitating regulatory compliance.

To date, manufacturers have been reluctant to deploy distributed capture solutions due to the limitations of the solutions available. Many older solutions were over complex, IT resource intensive, infelxible, difficult to integrate with ECMs and expensive. However, newer solutions have overcome these issues.

Case Study - Consumer Health Product Manufacturer

A large manufacturer operating manufacturing facilities in 35 countries needs to ensure that quality control of products manufactured at each facility meet product specifications.

Whenever a product fails a quality check, an event is triggered which requires the associated machine to be shut down to allow engineers to identify the cause of the problem. Regardless of whether the problem is with the machine or is a process control issue [raw materials not processed as predicted] the result is: an unusable product, delayed shipment of usable product, and delayed production while the problem is addressed. In turn, this leads to increased production costs, lost revenues, and lower customer satisfaction.

To reduce such events, quality team must be able to identify defective product in a timely manner and make the information available to operation managers so that the cause can be readily identified and the problem can be fixed.

They must also identify defective raw materials and notify suppliers quickly to minimize process-related red events. Most of the company’s products are manufactured using more than 30 different raw materials, the majority of which are obtained from outside suppliers.

Optimizing financial performance requires managers to have an in depth understanding of how products and customers consume resources and this is why manufacturers are adopting more sophisticated cost and profitability analytics - solutions that go beyond production and include the supply chain, support functions and infrastructure.

With a robust and reliable understanding of costs and profitability and their sensitivity to changes in demand, managers are able to make informed and incisive decisions about strategy and tactics.

For certain manufacturers, where the product or the delivery method is tailored for the individual customer, it may be appropriate to use profitability analytics at the micro-level by individual customer or individual transaction.

1KEY Business Intelligence (BI) helps manufacturers give them better visibility of their financial performance and the insight and understanding to improve it. These include solutions for cost and profitability analytics and for operational planning and budgeting.
Being able to quickly assess the impact of internal and external changes, 1KEY BI helps such companies become more agile and better able to keep the bottom line on track.

This scenario enables you to analyze production process transaction data in order to be able to carry out the following types of analysis:

Plan/actual comparison
Production period-specific analysis
Capacity analysis
Status analysis

Next: Business Solutions To Manufacturing Issues

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