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Data warehousing in Manufacturing Industry

Business Intelligence and Data warehousing in manufacturing industries

Manufacturing industries these days have come out of the old all manual system and implemented lot of automated processes. They are trying to adopt to the ever changing information technology standards. Even though the pace is less, someday many manufacturing organizations will surely boast of their world class IT systems.

As and how any manufacturing organization makes progress in implementing new automated systems, there will be huge addition to the amount of data that is being created. It is extremely important to capture these information in a timely manner to provide valuable BI data. However, maintaining a quality data warehouse for a manufacturing organization is not as easy as it sounds.

The reasons are many.

Data comes from different parties like suppliers, contract manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and consumers etc
Manufacturing standards might be different at different unit of an organization, it leads to huge confusion.
Timely availability of critical data
Many islands of info

Data from multiple parties

One of the common problem is that we have to deal with different parties to get the data. Say for example, unless we have complete details of contract manufactures & their processes, there is always going to be big hole in the chain. However, it is hard to collect all the necesseity data from every single sub-contracters due to the fact that they are all not under one roof. This dependency always degrades the quality of data.

Varying process standards across units

It sounds weird, but I had come across different manufacturing units of a same organization following different process standards. For example, there are multiple stages from arrival of purchase item to payment done for the invoice. In some units steps 1, 2 and 5 will only be done. However, they put step 5 details as step 3 in their IT system. This kind of variation in following the processing standards will lead to really spurious, confusing data. Hence, the organization should first cleanup these basic problems.

Timely availability of critical data

Due to the dependency on multiple parties and units it is almost never happens that the data is uptodate. Always there will be some delay before the data is inserted into system.

Many information islands

Most of the old heads in manufacturing industries love their excel systems. They are experts in it. It is often seen that many top level management are adamant when it comes to adopting to new tool or syatem. As a result, some information does not reaches everybody, rather keeps getting accumulated at multiple locations.

For the complexities mentioned so far and many other reasons, it sounds difficult to implement a valuable BI system in a manufacturing company. Successful handling of supply chain links and uniforming the internal units could only help for better BI system.