How does Power BI help the Manufacturing Industry

Welcome to the world of the digital transformation where business intelligence systems—like Microsoft’s Azure and Power BI—are making it easier for manufacturers to harness their data in a matter of days, not weeks.

With the help of automation, manufacturers are collating data and connecting it to KPI-centric dashboards. They are transforming the way they do business.

A while ago, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s progressive CEO, spoke about how manufacturers can capitalize on the conjunction of big data and operations technology: “It changes how you will engage with your customers, how you, in fact, empower your own employees inside every one of your organizations to be able to gain insight from big data, take action from big data, and to optimize your operations and change the very nature of the business models around your industrial products.”

Let’s discuss it a bit.

Customer engagement- Irrespective of a B2B or B2C structure, your customers are concerned about on-time delivery, quality, price, and predictability of service. With Power BI, manufacturers can calibrate each step of the production process, ensuring operations, delivery, costs, and quality control are functioning with top-class efficiency. And when there is a slight malfunction or disarray, the person-in-charge will be the first to sound the alarm, knowing that everyone can view the same insight.

Empowering employees- When things go wrong, along with collateral damage, you, as an entrepreneur will have to put out the blame game as well. One department will try to shift the blame to the other. With Power BI, you can remove the plague of this blame game altogether by giving every employee a shared picture of progress against goals.  Empirically identifying restrictions radically diminishes finger-pointing and empowers employees to make critical decisions on the ground.

Act on time: Instead of wasting time going through reports after reports that delay your decision-making time by, say, sometimes weeks, Power BI’s real-time visibility helps you to make decisions by exception, on the matters that impact results the most.  Using Power BI, you can stop being overburdened by any kind of urgent issues that sneak into your office and instead proactively focus on priority cases that move the needle.

Optimizing operations- With the power of automation, you can accrue your data and let it reside in a data storehouse, gaining the reliability of a scalable, single source of certainty. This helps employees spread across all departments alike to navigate via a single platform, in near real-time and giving everyone easy access to facts and figures that optimize inventory, reduce waste, and shorten order-to-cash and time-to-ship metrics.

Predictive analysis- Power BI can improve your supply chain competence and flexibility by linking your inventory data to your suppliers and distributors.  With predictive analytics, forestall inventory deficiencies and surpluses before they materialize, and alert your suppliers to inventory requirements in real-time. The key is to detect and repair any weak points early on.

For manufacturing companies, using data intelligently along the value chain can mean gaining a decisive competitive edge. Power BI provides the transparency that you need to make well-thought decisions based on data from the entire value chain.

At AhaApps we implement your business intelligence and data analytics project based on your requirements and preferences, making your business, a success. Have we sparked your interest in Power BI? Then do speak with us to create a solution for your specific business needs, collaboratively.