Data & Analytics, ERP

Production controlling reduces costs and increases quality

Michael Hering11/20/2019

Planning plays a major role in manufacturing. Manufacturing and assembly are often divided into individual steps that have to be linked together in a multi-stage planning process. But good planning is not the same as fighting half the battle. After all, discrepancies can occur during production that influence the due dates, quality, or costs of the end product.

Get a handle on manufacturing with business intelligence

Business intelligence solutions help your employees to identify discrepancies like these at an early stage in the manufacturing process by monitoring, consolidating, and evaluating the key performance indicators of all production resources. This means they can keep an eye on all relevant information and react immediately if any of the following factors deviate from the plan:

  • Machine utilization
  • Order status
  • Adherence to schedules
  • Material costs
  • Produced quantities
  • Quality

You can also refer to time series comparisons and “what-if scenarios”. The transparency and resilience of the data significantly contributes to reducing reaction times in the event of difficult situations. In the long term, this also improves the information base for management decisions and provides new potential for process optimization. No manufacturing company can afford to operate in the dark these days.

Concerns are unfounded

Medium-sized companies in particular commonly start off by asking the following questions:

  • Do we even meet the prerequisites for implementing business intelligence software?
  • How do we get the required production data into the system when we still partially work on paper?
  • Are professional analysis tools like these not much too expensive?
  • What if our employees reject the new software?

The answer is that a lack of overview and delayed reaction times will sooner or later result in competitive disadvantages. Burying your head in the sand and doing nothing is not an option.

Important planning data, always accessible

The BI solution from COSMO CONSULT for manufacturing companies stands out with pre-defined data models and reports to consolidate and evaluate information from Microsoft ERP or other data sources such as Microsoft Excel. The implementation time is also relatively short. Your employees are then able to evaluate and visualize data in real time in so-called self-service procedures in order to draw the right conclusions. No in-depth programming or database knowledge is required for this – a short user training session is all that is needed. The simple, intuitive user experience ensures a high level of user acceptance.

With professional BI software, you can start concentrating on those key performance indicators that may have received little or no consideration until now. Have discussions across departments to decide which are particularly relevant to you. Jointly define the most important determinants and involve the management team in this decision.

Grow your prospects with data

If data is missing from an evaluation or you discover incorrect information, you need to identify and rectify the causes of this. You can also fall back on tried-and-tested household remedies: If, for example, accurate information about the machine set-up time is missing, this can also be measured manually using a stopwatch if necessary and then entered in Excel. The data exists, you just need to make sure that it is also available. Business intelligence projects usually start off small, often with just five issues – but development is dynamic, meaning that you reach more than 50 decision-relevant factors within a very short space of time.

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Author:
Michael Hering
Industry Manager Discrete | COSMO CONSULT