Plastics Manufacturing: Business Intelligence Is The New Currency, Not Big Data
Okay, this is not just for Plastic Manufacturing, but given the competitiveness and growth of plastics, I’d suggest that this statement is absolutely true. Consider some of these typical comments:
- “Geez, if we’d only known earlier…”
- “Who could have predicted that?”
- “Why aren’t we doing that?”
- “It seems so obvious now…”
- “We could be rich if we received a nickel for every…”
Big data has been trending for over the past 10-15 years with the iPhone and other mobile related applications really bringing it to the forefront in the past 10 years (witness the iPhone 10 year anniversary occurring on June 29th, 2017). And, while data is exploding, it is the harvesting, analytics, and automated action that is driving transformational decisions. Data is not the new currency… data combined with Business Intelligence is the new currency since it helps drive better and faster decisions allowing focus, nimbleness and pivoting as external factors require, and industry disruption to capitalize on innovative business models. More importantly, we say new currency since it results in new revenue channels, improved margins, and greater competitiveness.
While more data can seem helpful, not without the distilling, predictive, analytical and automated Business Intelligence tools that help drive insight into better and faster actionable decisions. It can be applied towards: customers, supply chain, production, operations, warehouse management, finance, sales, procurement, product management…and, all the external factors influencing your industry…
What this means for Plastic Manufacturing and other hyper competitive manufacturing industries:
- Improved OEE performance through real-time monitoring using sensors, advanced predictive analytics and focus on continuous improvement
- Customer satisfaction optimization by alerting, reduced latency, shrinking cycle times, better quality and strides towards mass customization/personalization
- Supply chain advancements through intelligent procurement (when and how much), better collaboration, and Just In Time automation
- Better costing and price elastic modeling to better understand your business and focused segments
- New business models that can disrupt industries by providing new revenue streams, improved margins and focus on top and bottom line results
For more on how PowerBI is utilized, take a look at our previous blog post, “PowerBI: Focusing on Driving Time to Value”