As the manufacturing industry continues to grow more competitive, how can your company get ahead? Quick decision-making is critical to your company’s competitive advantage. When making decisions, do you have the information you need? Manufacturers certainly do not lack data. Information gathered from all areas of the business is readily available on desktop computers, PDAs, and in endless reports. However, does this information help you make sound business decisions, plan for the future, and save money? Is your information data or intelligence?
The New Need for Intelligence
In the past, most manufacturers added stand-alone technology systems that gather data from one area of the business. These traditional data silos provide a significant amount of localized historical information. With the introduction of performance management techniques within the industry, it quickly became apparent that isolated systems would not be able to continuously manage information across business processes and provide links to all decision levels – strategic, tactical, and operational. To utilize data as intelligence, independent systems need to be connected so that they provide consistent data, analysis, and documentation to the entire company.
Consistent, Accurate, and Available
Performance management begins with aligning a company to one vision, one “truth.” This idea is applicable to company data as well; there needs to be one source of data that is considered the “truth” for your company. Each division, department, and branch will then work from data that is consistent across the company rather than information isolated to one area. Decision-making will improve when everyone is working from the same information.
The availability of data is also crucial. Decision-makers at all levels need to be able to quickly access data that will help them improve the performance of their area and synchronize their efforts to reach a set of common goals. Without the availability of consistent information at all levels, your company will continue to operate in independent silos that could potentially be working toward conflicting goals.
Historical and Proactive Analysis
While consistency, accuracy, and availability are crucial, the real power of data is found in analysis. Your system needs to work for you by providing trends, “what if” analysis, comparisons, alerts, and much more. By structuring your system to include business rules, performance metrics, and technical specifications, data can be analyzed and processes can be managed by your technology. Structured analysis can provide comparisons and relationships across production lines as well as look at variables both up and downstream. The strength of intelligence is the ability to gain a deeper understanding of why issues or variances occurred, to predict future demands, and to identify concerns while a product is in production. This intelligence will help your management make better decisions, save money, and improve customer satisfaction.
Intelligence Library
Where do you store the intelligence so that it continues to be easily accessible? An intelligence library is the repository that will capture your company’s information over time so that it is not lost through changes in the company or personnel. By both automatic and manual population, the library should be filled with reports, analysis, e-mail discussions, and other information to provide complete historical documentation that can serve as an invaluable reference and a collaborative learning tool for teams involved with improvement projects and problem-solving efforts.
Effective and efficient decision-making will continue to be vital as a competitive advantage as well as for capitalizing on new business opportunities. The intelligence provided by consistent, accurate, and accessible data and analysis will help you make the sound business decisions necessary for your company’s success.