Operational Performance Management for Manufacturing
While considering a BI solution for manufacturing industry, one should make sure that it leverages all the sources of data available throughout the manufacturing process to deliver a holistic view. Smart decisions must be based on data that accurately reflects the true state of the entire manufacturing process. A solution must leverage existing
infrastructure investments without requiring additional data consolidation or integration projects. The BI solution must be able to adapt to different data models, data sources, or changes in the underlying sources.
Typically a BI tool should deliver most, if not all, of the features listed below at a price point that fits the company’s budget:
Alerts – Critical alerts and reporting of quality metrics in real time provide crucial monitoring, proactive notification, and automation capabilities that help your company adapt to changing conditions and avoid alarming scenarios pertaining to payables, receivables, budgets, sales, and inventory. With alerts functionality in place, you can pre-set a wide variety of benchmarks in all of these areas and protect yourself from missing key time- or date-sensitive events or failing to respond to deviations from acceptable levels enabling intelligent decision making and action
Inquiry – Having an easy-to-use inquiry tool enables you to drill down into a specific area and quickly extract data that is essential to your business. For example, if you need to examine sales trends by region over the last 12 months, identify the top 5 customers for the quarter, or locate the top 10 best-selling items for the last month, this type of BI tool will serve you well.
Analysis tool – SMBs want the ability to bring in data from multiple locations and still be able to see a unified macro view of the entire enterprise. Analysis software should help you achieve this goal-providing a quick snapshot of your business and enabling you to drill down into sales and purchasing trends, as well as perform budget analysis. Some of these solutions offer “scorecards” that provide a quick view of the overall health of your business. Make sure to insist on a multi-dimensional analysis tool that fully utilizes Excel’s capabilities, including pivot tables and charts.
Operational Dashboards – Dashboards that provide real-time visibility into business operations and key risk indicators, allowing users to quickly react to changing market conditions and make timely decisions. Operational dashboards can be used to acknowledge alerts generated by the activity server or to initiate actions such as generating workflows, for example, based on alerts. Each user can personalize his dashboard with the metrics and alerts that are relevant to his job function.
An effective dashboard should provide a graphical snapshot of your business’s health that is easy to understand. Some common categories of data (often from Excel) feeding the dashboard are revenues by period, product sales by category, actual vs. budgeted financial indicators, and expenses by category, just to name a few. The good news is that you can take full advantage of affordable BI solutions that offer this type of functionality.
Quick KPI’s – Whether analyzing business performance vs. another company or between divisions within your company, quick access to key performance indicators enables you to see how your business is measuring up at any moment in time. This type of solution should possess the capability to compare financial models and actual performance vs. budget and forecast numbers for different time periods. In addition, it should enable you to quickly establish benchmarking of results vs. competitors over varying time periods. Finally, you should be able to export any KPI report or model to Microsoft Excel or Word.
Graphical Presentations of data – Viewing data in graphical format makes the process of analyzing performance so much quicker and easier. Make sure that your BI solution incorporates customizable graphical views of your data in grid, pivot table, and interactive chart formats. This should be standard feature, not an accessory.
Flexible reporting capabilities – The ability to create and generate reports (including exception reports) that accurately reflect your company’s key performance data is crucial as is the ability to customize these reports and display them graphically, if needed. In addition, you should be able to export these reports to an Excel worksheet or include Excel spreadsheet data in these reports.
Remote access – Most decision-makers conduct a significant portion of their business while out of the office. Thus, it is essential that they have remote access to a wide range of their company’s vital business data any time they want via the Internet. Make sure your BI solution enables you to access your KPI’s such as sales, product, and customer analyses, income and balance sheets, and inventory reports whenever you are out of the office.
Report automation – In order to stay ahead of the competition, most SMBs can’t afford to sit back and wait for their IT or accounting departments to provide the information they need to make informed decisions. They must be proactive in automating their entire reporting process–from the creation to generation to distribution of reports across the entire enterprise. Armed with streamlined, high-volume reporting, these companies are equipped to respond to ever-changing market conditions and make the best possible decisions that impact the health of their business.
Posted on July 31st, 2008 by Vikram Kole
Filed under: Business Intelligence
Leave a Reply