By Sanjay Mehta
There never seems to be enough time or resources to meet the needs of factory managers who face the ‘fact gap’ that exists between the data and the usable information required to make real business decisions. Agile enterprise is always one step ahead of the competition, which cultivates a responsive environment and delivers major improvements in lead time, product quality and lower production costs. Optimising performance requires managers to have an in-depth understanding of how products and customers consume resources and this is why manufacturers adopt 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.  Manufacturing MIS• Material Requirements Planning (MRP). o Determine when finished products are needed. o Determine deadlines accordingly. • Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRPII). o Network scheduling. o Improve customer service and productivity. • Just In Time (JIT) Inventory System o Inventory and Materials delivered right before usage. Companies adopt Business Intelligence (BI) Reporting & Analytics software as part of their strategic approach for attaining their goals. They are streamlining the information flow, both across the organisation and through the tiers of the supply chain to reduce cycle and manufacturing time and adapt quickly to market changes. Reports generated in high data volume environments normally take a long time to run. To speed up report generation, many systems use tools that employ a summarisation technique, to reduce the amount of records, by aggregating records together with common characteristics. Problem with this technique includes inherent inflexibility and inability to cope with the constantly changing information needs of manufacturing. BI helps companies in the manufacturing industry to: • Increase the value of customer relationships. • Respond quickly to changing markets and company sensitivities. • Accelerate new product time-to-market. • Reduce inventory investment. • Improve planning, scheduling and the procurement schedule. • Maintain and develop quality assurance. • Select and apply world-class technologiess. Benefits of BI BI can be used to increase the flexibility and speed of operational reporting as: • Quickly generate established reports. • Easily create ad-hoc reports. • Isolate specific problems. • Analyse data across multiple systems. • Integrate new data sources. BI helps manufacturers get a better visibility of their financial performance and the insight and understanding to improve it. These include solutions for cost and profitability analytics and solutions for operational planning and budgeting. Being able to quickly assess the impact of internal and external changes, BI helps such companies become more agile and better able to keep the bottom line on track. Manufacturing Scheduling and Production Planning Manufacturing planning encompasses the hourly, daily, weekly and monthly production and machine schedules  across multiple plants or production lines to meet orders or forecasted demand. Success hinges on accurate materials planning. Manufacturing managers, product managers and purchasing analysts review metrics such as production capacity and current inventories to plan appropriate production schedules, ensure raw material availability and make plant reallocation decisions when appropriate. Basic analysis includes real-time status of plant utilisation and trends in market demand versus planned production runs. Advanced analysis includes hedging analysis on commodities used in production, forecasting of machine output and linear programmingto optimise production resources. Following business area are prime areas of concern for manufacturers: • Having a bird’s eye view of customer information which helps sales team to coordinate and collaborate customer interactions. Trace the metrics and indicators that improve customer satisfaction. • Lead time to fulfill customer orders across sales and distribution channels. • Improve ‘order promising’ (when a customer is promised delivery or issue resolution) through an analysis of historical statistics, expected lead time and inventory levels. • Analysis of current usage of products to launch new range of products. • Tracking service, to better predict and prepare inventory and production levels. • Benchmark distributors, regions and individual locations against each other in an attempt to foster increased attention to goals and metrics, and reward high performers and aid underachievers.  To overcome this, they need to maintain optimum level of inventory so as to avoid overstock or short-supply and bring innovative and profitable schemes at the marketing level. Business Intelligence is the right tool to achieve this.BI helps in keeping managers updated and equipped with state-of-the-art and exact information that helps in taking critical business decisions rather than going on assumptions. BI helps improve visibility and communication across increasingly complex manufacturing supply chains, while satisfying customer demands for new products and product enhancements. Using BI, one can assess cash-management and monitor operational effectiveness of the payables department to ensure lowest transaction costs. Identify most profitable customers, products and channels, and understand profitability drivers across regions, divisions and profit centres. Improve inventory management for those products that consistently fall into backlog due to lack of appropriate stock levels. Gain visibility into inventory activities to minimise unnecessary expenditures and optimise inventory to conserve working capital. Gain detailed visibility into direct and indirect spending, and identify opportunities for consolidation and reduction of costs. Monitor price, delivery and product quality to determine the best and the worst performing suppliers. Inventory KPI’s Financial KPI’s |
production costs, improve product quality, have a better tracking system and improve customer satisfaction. The industry also needs to respond quickly to changing market environments. Currently, delivering key information to key people has gained extra importance that can help plan for production, reduce hidden costs, keep optimum level of inventory and maximise profits. 
One of the challenges that the manufacturing industries face is due to changes in demand. If managers have a proper understanding of costs and demand, they can make better decisions. Some of the manufacturers also have a customer specific costing.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
