The manufacturing sector has become more unpredictable and risky than it was, in any other decade. Sudden lockdowns, unimagined shutdowns, heightening costs, supply chain troubles, complexities in operations, and issues in handling logistics processes – we have witnessed it all for various companies.
The way to keep your business away from such issues is to address such complexities in time.
How will you do it?
In a way or another, all these challenges are connected to the inefficiency of businesses in dealing with diverse and giant data. So, if your venture could process, visualize and handle data properly, it will be able to see coming trends, understanding arriving issues, and comprehend positive possibilities faster than any of your rivals.
This makes Business Intelligence Implementation (BI) an important process for a manufacturing company.
Tools like Power BI by Microsoft can be utilized by your organization to streamline its processes better and for understanding the patterns & trends of the industry, predicting more precisely, and acting as per them. In this article, we will tell you how you can leverage Power BI in various ways and for your various operations.
A Quick Glimpse of Microsoft Power BI: What does it do?
Power BI is an amazing suite of applications/tools that compromise several data visualization and business analytics tools for your organization. This Microsoft product is a self-service solution and is cloud-based.
Also Read: Benefits of Microsoft Power BI
Using Power BI, one can fetch highly useful insights and use them to make better and precision decisions, driven by data. Your manufacturing business can model, source, compile and transfer data that is being imported to it from your on-premise or cloud-based data warehouse(s). This will enable the tool to create interactive, insightful, and intuitive reports in an automated manner.
How Power BI can lead your way to Digital transformation?
The manufacturing industry and businesses in this sector can perform rigorous data analysis through Power BI and prepare effective strategies through it. The said process will consume lesser time and will be more precise and trustable.
By moving from the traditional approach to the automated one, you will be able to monitor KPIs that will drive your organization towards higher profits and improved productivity.
Also Read: Deploying Next-Gen Business Intelligence Solution For Telecommunications Industry
The efficiency, revenue, speed, and quality of decisions – everything will improve for you, just by starting to use Power BI. This tool will also reduce the cost of operations, data processing expenses, and efforts being put into all kinds of processes.
All in all, Power BI will act as the driving force of innovation and help you compete well in this era of cut-throat competition.
Usage of Power BI for Various Manufacturing Processes
Visual data report creation, performance monitoring, and improved decision-making are a few major tasks that Power BI created KPIs do. These KPIs source data from numerous destinations, and generate metrics-based reports related to product-specific trends, production-specific trends, and so on. It can also help you identify underperforming products and do a lot more.
Also Read: Benefits of Power BI
Power BI Dashboard can interact with multiple third-party software applications, including ERP systems, to fetch important data. You can choose the date range and get real-time reports for your monetary evaluations. It improves your business’s performance through:
- Automated, Interactive and Intuitive reporting
A plethora of data doesn’t signify better decision-making, but processed data does. Power BI lets your business fully automate the fetching and processing of the business data. Later, you can filter your data and reports by date.
These reports can be shared with various people in your organization so that the proper performance analysis, production estimation, budget optimization, trend analysis, measurement of actual volumes, forecasts related to consumption and sales, and maintenance can happen.
This tool will provide needed information in real-time, and whenever you will ask for it.
- Precise Analytics Data
For manufacturing businesses, it is imperative to predict demand, consumption, and sales with higher precision. Using the predictive analytics capabilities of Power BI, it becomes easy for organizations to predict better insights and trends in time. As it can process way more data than manual processes, its analytics reports are faster and flawless.
Utilizing Power BI’s business intelligence and analytics tools, your manufacturing organization can get a clearer view of the production lifecycle in real-time. Integration, data flexibility, analysis and visualization will be better with such aids.
Be it daily or lone-term decision-making, your decision-making and ability to solve business problems will be improved by the deployment of Power BI.
- Power BI DAX (Data analysis expressions)
Unlike other BI tools that leverage excel reports, Power BI offers a more powerful reporting and analysis capability, called DAX. This feature fetches the real-time data to an interactive and easy-to-use interface for your professionals so that they use to utilize it without difficulties. In comparison to the excel sheets, using DAX is easier. However, its formulae are pretty similar to that of excel.
Visualization data and charts, rendered through DAX, provide better insights in a more understandable way. With it, you can monitor and analyze the data for different ranges and products without much effort.
In short, it utilizes datasets better and provides much deeper insights related to your manufacturing operations.
Manufacturing Business Operations that get benefitted from Power BI Deployment
- Sales Prediction
By enabling you to view trends and information related to your products, Power BI improves the sales prediction capability for your business. As the sales prediction happens better with it, the production processes can also be streamlined through it.
- Inventory Management
With Power BI, your organization can track various manufacturing units and their data in real-time. The margin on products, turnover, consumption rate, demands in the next few days, defective pieces’ data, and various other data values can be monitored and predicted for you easily. As a result, the inventories across your locations will be maintained better.
Power BI dashboards can keep detailed reports related to your stocks, delivery schedules, stock-outs, vendors, products, material, and warehouses for improved inventory management.
- Quality Assurance
Quality assurance is one great way to ensure customer satisfaction and retention. For this, you can use Power BI to see important patterns and figure out the aspects affecting your processes’ quality.
Test plans, issue listing, and case management for your various processes are easier with Power BI. For the ETL data process bottlenecks, you can perform the validation of data and improve the precision through BI, boosting the quality of the overall project lifecycle.
- Finance Management
Operations, processes, production, vendor management, order fulfillment, sales, forecasting, and so on – Power BI can handle a lot of things in your manufacturing business. Indirectly, these aspects are the ones affecting your revenue and processes. So this way, Power BI plays a crucial role in the upliftment of the ROI for your business.
It helps in the optimization of your internal processes, resulting in great cost-saving.
Also, for improved financial management, Power BI lets you track all the monetary data and perform a cost-benefit analysis. This means the tool plays an important part in streamlining the financial processes directly too.
The Final Word
COVID and competition are two threats that are affecting the manufacturing businesses severely at present. To handle the situation, your business must automate its processes and decision-making. Using Power BI, the same can be done for your inventory, supply chain, logistics, machine operations, and sales analysis.
Want to enable the path of growth and automation through Power BI for your enterprise?
Ask Stridely Solutions to deploy Power BI with its full potential for your manufacturing venture right away. Our professionals will integrate the advanced capabilities and user-friendly dashboard for your business users.
