Managing Automation - December 2007 - (Page 22) [ COVER STORY ] and what went wrong the previous day, and more visibility into the operational aspects of insights into what they can do to correct their organizations, the shop floor, the supply problems. “We can now influence the process chain, etc.,” says John Hagarty, an analyst at closer to the time we see a deviation,” Raikar AMR Research. “For that reason, the notion says. “We get better decision-making, from of operational BI is resonating in a big way our company’s leadership down to the manright now.” ager who runs the warehouse.” Most manufacturers are only too familiar Manufacturers have access to lots of data with the forces generating the need for imthat could, in theory, be used to track and proved operational agility. Shorter and shorter tune business processes on the fly. Between product life cycles, particularly in vertical marERP, plant floor, supply chain, and CRM syskets such as high-tech electronics, mean that tems, most manufacturers are generating manufacturers can no longer afford to wait enough data to choke a horse. until the end of the month, or even the end of The problem has been getting the right the week, to understand whether production data into the hands of front-line operational yields are meeting expectations. Similarly, as managers quickly enough to help them fix supply networks become more complex and or even head off inventory build-ups or out-of-stock blips before they bloom “We can now influence the process into serious problems. Traditional BI closer to the time we see a deviation. tools, such as canned reports or data warehouses, typically weren’t designed We get better decision-making.” — for that purpose. Increasingly, howev- Ajay Raikar, Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream er, manufacturers are turning to a rapidly emerging set of technologies that promglobal, manufacturers need to understand ise to deliver what some call operational quickly how a problem involving one supplier business intelligence — BI that is real-time, or part affects specific customers and what to easily accessed by front-line operational mando about it. At the same time, to avoid runagers, and tightly integrated with day-to-day ning afoul of government regulations or inbusiness processes. These operational BI creasingly common customer service-level tools offer manufacturers a way to react more agreements (SLAs), manufacturers need to quickly and effectively to an accelerating rate recognize and fix operational problems as soon of business change and its effects on such as they crop up. critical issues as inventories, quality, and orUnfortunately, BI systems, as traditionally der fulfillment, experts say. designed and deployed, haven’t been very “In order to react to changes in the busigood at providing real-time insights into operness brought on by things like globalization ational performance. For one thing, BI techand intense competition, manufacturers need nology has not typically operated in an interactive or real-time fashion, but rather in batch mode. In a traditional BI environment, data from multiple transactional systems, such as ERP, is usually downloaded to a data warehouse or data mart on a pre-defined schedule after going through an extract/transform/load AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME (ETL) process. At most manufacturing comWhat is the status of your operational BI environment? panies, the process takes place weekly or monthly (see chart, p. 25). Fairly mature 14% Recently deployed 11% This means that, though rich in historical data and context, most BI environments Fully mature 2% based on data warehouses are not good at providing users with insight into an event or Selling the idea 10% series of events that have just happened. At the same time, because data warehouses Under must store lots of historical information, they development 27% usually aggregate data, sometimes making it difficult for users to extract operational, deExploring the idea 35% tailed information when they need it. On top of that, most BI systems have not been designed for use by managers and others Note: Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding. Source: The Data Warehousing Institute involved in operational roles. Instead, most taking the pulse ma December 22 2007
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