Manufacturers everywhere have an extremely underutilized employee. This employee is a robust repository of institutional knowledge, facts, and random trivia. However, this employee is full of latent potential that hasn’t yet been tapped, and they are ready to do so much more.

Ok, so maybe this is a quirky metaphor, but—in case it wasn’t clear—this underutilized employee is your organization’s data. And Data could be doing so much more to help your human employees make better decisions.

For many manufacturers, the collected data is sitting in various databases and spreadsheets, waiting to be called upon, sorted, and analyzed to inform decisions across your organization. Unfortunately, you are faced with several challenges when it comes to managing and using your data, including:

• multiple, disconnected software systems that require inefficient, manual data consolidation
• large amounts of data, making it difficult to identify and consume only the relevant information
• limited access to modern tools to interact and analyze data for real-time decision-making

When you can aggregate, analyze, and act on your data, this provides your organization with a high level of operational intelligence and uncovers many more opportunities for business success. Here’s a look at the answers to who, how, and what you need to put your underutilized employee, Data, to work.

Who

You don’t need to start with the most expensive or biggest possible change to get Data achieving to their highest potential. First, you need to find who will be the champion for your data-based initiative and dedicated to its success within your organization. Data’s mentor, if you will.

Depending on how the organization is structured, this “mentor” could be a business intelligence and reporting manager in the IT department, or a line of business analyst in a departmental role within your organization. Whoever it is, this person needs to be vested in Data’s professional growth, helping them make the move from being an information repository to a decision-making powerhouse.

How

How will you know that Data has successfully made the transition from being just an information repository to performing the necessary duties to inform smart and successful business decisions?

Metrics.

Turning Data from a collection of disparate information points into actionable insights that meet key metrics requires Networked BI from Birst. This software provides a valued-based design methodology to help manufacturers look at current manufacturing operations and identify metrics to will help measure the success of these operations.

For example, Citrix Systems, a leading provider of virtualization, networking, and cloud computing solutions for more than 130,000 organizations worldwide, uses Birst to identify key metrics and aggregate information that was previously captured in over 150 spreadsheets.

What

What else do manufacturers need to make the most of their data? They need a comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage their day-to-day operations—including collecting all the data.

With one of Infor’s ERP systems, manufacturers can easily connect multiple data sources into one place where they can store and retrieve all the data required to run their operations—and likely even the data required to help their customers run their operations. Case studies:

https://pages.infor.com/manufacturing-case-study-hein-lehmann.html https://pages.infor.com/manufacturing-case-study-l3-communications.html

-> The solutions and services provided by Smartwork support companies in their projects of growth and evolution both at the level of individual business areas, and in a context of fully integrated processes: https://smartworknet.eu/infor/

Source: https://www.infor.com/blog/manufacturers-its-time-to-put-data-to-work

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