A Data-Driven Approach to Managing Manufacturing Processes
About the Client
The client is a full-service engineering and semiconductor manufacturing company based out of Germany. The manufacturer is well-known for offering a broad range of products that fit into several product categories across industries.
The Business Challenge
Manufacturers in today’s business world are often faced with razor-thin margins and are pressurized to bring the best products to market faster and more efficiently than their peers. From facilities management to supply chain and product design every domain in an industrial sector is always on the lookout to identify bottlenecks and optimize production processes. Collecting data is crucial to business success in such a complex business scenario, but how do you analyze it to extract actionable insights? This is where manufacturing analytics can help. It helps collect and analyze massive sets of data generated by manufacturing companies by consolidating and categorizing them into easy to understand metrics. Manufacturing analytics dashboards learn from the data they gather, which can be further processed to generate reports. Many companies today wish to identify bottlenecks in their manufacturing processes. Though there are several ways to do so, many turn to traditional ERP systems to identify bottlenecks rather than manufacturing analytics. This brings in several roadblocks for a couple of reasons- EPR systems generally represent best-case scenarios and do not consider other possibilities, at many times the approach to routing in the ERP system is not what actually happens in the shop floor.
To gain a leading edge in today’s complicated business scenario it’s essential to adopt a data-driven approach by leveraging manufacturing analytics. Wondering where to start request a free demo.
In this case, the clients’ objective was to deliver high-quality products and services that are innovative and reliable. The manufacturing client was tasked with analyzing their product design and project plans to reduce operational costs and enhance manufacturing efficiency. This is when the manufacturing company chose to partner with a manufacturing analytics solution provider, that specializes in helping manufacturers to affordably capture data and turn them into actionable insights through easy to use dashboards. They wanted to leverage Quantzig’s manufacturing analytics expertise to improve their ability to impact and improve manufacturing quality, efficiency, and performance.
Top Challenges Faced by the Manufacturer
Problem Statement 1
The traditional methods adopted by the client and their reliance on manual tracking systems left no room for improvement. This further hindered their capability to reduce overtime, decrease downtime, and improve machine utilization.
Problem Statement 2
The complexity of the tools used prevented them from gaining complete visibility into operational data and product data in real-time. They were looking for a solution which would be easy for anyone to use but would still be flexible enough for analysis across multiple data sources.
Problem Statement 3
The inability to calculate and accurately predict machine downtime increased errors across product lines and prevented them from operating smoothly.
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Solutions Offered and Value Delivered
The manufacturing analytics solutions offered were divided into the following three phases:
Phase 1
The initial phase of this manufacturing analytics engagement revolved around identifying the client’s data needs. It involved an in-depth analysis that led to the identification of – the types of datasets that coincided with each manufacturing process, the different data points such as the cost of raw materials and time take to develop product components, the percentage of products that don’t pass quality-control guidelines, delivery-success rates, and more.
Phase 2
The second phase of this manufacturing analytics engagement focused more on the principles of lean manufacturing followed by the identification of key performance indicators to understand the organization’s goals and to define and the measure success ratio.
Phase 3
The third phase of this manufacturing analytics engagement revolved around the design and development of manufacturing analytics dashboards that captured real-time data generated from manufacturing processes to generate actionable insights.
The client credits the success of this implementation to several improvements that occurred over the course of this manufacturing analytics success story. Following the implementation of the new dashboards, data entry seemed to be a thing of past. Along with being a big time-saver the implementation of the new dashboard helped them to reduce errors, work more efficiently, and focus on improving uptime. A major highlight was the ability to accurately predict downtime and quickly resolve issues, which in turn helped them to reduce costs by over 60%. Manufacturing analytics also enabled the client to successfully increase productivity, reduce wastage of raw materials, and streamline operations across all product lines.
What is Manufacturing Analytics?
Manufacturing analytics is a new discipline in analytics that brings together industrial internet of things (IOI), big data, predictive analytics, and mobile first design to address challenges faced by manufacturing companies. Manufacturing analytics focuses on analyzing the gathered datasets rather than on process control to improve operational efficiency. What makes manufacturing analytics unique is that it is designed to handle massive volumes of time series data that is produced by manufacturing companies.
About Quantzig
Quantzig is a well-known analytics service provider, with over 15 years of experience in offering end-to-end data management and analytics solutions to over 55+ Fortune 500 companies. Our capability to harness maximum insights from the influx of continuous information around us is what will drive any organization’s competitive readiness and success. Our objective is to bring together the best combination of our manufacturing analytics solutions and industry knowledge to complement our clients with a shared need to discover and leverage manufacturing analytics to drive continuous business excellence.
