Is data analysis getting the better of you?

Data management is now a major issue for companies throughout the tire and rubber products manufacturing industries, write Nick Barth, UK sales engineering manager at Microstrategy - an enterprise software company with major customers in the sector:

All rubber manufacturing companies, irrespective of size rely on data. Data is critical to making decisions that improve the efficiency of supply chains and manufacturing processes, enhancing quality, safety and service levels.

Getting that data in a timely manner and in a format that can be digested easily is key to being successful in all these areas. That may seem a little obvious, so why can it be so difficult to achieve? We are all used to receiving reports from systems and even the most rudimentary examples will utilise some form of analytics. We accept static reports as the status quo, but does that mean we’re as nimble as we would like and missing opportunities.

Put simply, is your analytics platform getting the better of you?

That might sound like a strange question, but see if any of the signs below resonate with your manufacturing business. If they do, your analytics platform might be keeping you at arms length from the very insight it is supposed to give you.

Your analytics platform feels like the Wild West – On one hand, it is great that more staff involved in the manufacturing process are taking analytics into their own hands and using it to gain insights to help make decisions, but this can’t happen at the expense of governance. An ‘anything goes’ attitude to analytics can lead to people having access to information that they shouldn’t, building inaccurate models and even breaking the law. Self-service has to be reconciled with governance, and it can, the two are not mutually exclusive.

By the time analytics gets to decision-makers, it’s too late – The best analysis in the world is useless unless it enables action to be taken. If it takes days or weeks of shoulder jostling and chasing to get analytics produced then its value diminishes the closer you get to decision time and the business is at greater risk. The best way to overcome this is to empower the production decision-makers, give them the tools that allow them to build and manipulate their analysis directly to gain the insights needed.

You invest millions in big data without seeing a penny in return – You may collect gigabytes of data about your customers and other parts of your operations every day – but what have you got to show for it? If you’ve got a huge data warehouse, but have yet to find a way to let business users tap into it, then it is time to look at changing to analytics and visualisation tools that will allow you to realise the true value of the investment made in big data.

Mobilising your manufacturing sites has been trickier than anticipated – Being able to access anything anywhere has become the yard stick by which true mobility is measured. Analytics and reporting are no exception, with users expecting the kind of responsive and interactive experience they get when using their favourite tablet or smartphone apps outside of work. If you want to embrace mobile analytics, but are getting overwhelmed by the amount of work it will take to build and manage applications across platforms – then you are probably looking at the wrong analytics solution

Deployments are just too slow – If you are struggling to keep up with the demands of business and production shop-floor to produce dashboards or analytics apps then maybe you need more staff, or maybe you need a new solution. One that not only empowers users to build their own dashboards, but that is comprehensive in its delivery across a range of devices, enabling IT staff to focus on building the analytics app the management and production teams have asked for, not the plumbing that needs to sit under them.

The reality is that enabling analytics in rubber manufacturing businesses of all sizes, can no longer simply be viewed as an application requirement. It has to deliver analytics that supports the whole organisation and enables it to realise the true potential of the data it holds, and this requires a platform-based approach.

An end-to-end solution that delivers reports and analytics based on near real-time data to any user, in any location, on any device. Anything less that this impacts the productivity of your staff and the insight the business needs to make the critical decisions that lower risk and drive growth in such a demanding industry.