Beyond Reports or Spreadsheets
Business analytics today involves far more than reports and spreadsheets. But despite significant investments in business intelligence (BI) software, many manufacturing organizations continue to operate with a limited set of business analytics, focused largely on querying and reporting. These are useful tasks, but they are tactically oriented, focused on what happened in the past and lacking a clear connection to the organization’s overall goals and objectives. This information unquestionably remains necessary, but today it is no longer sufficient; manufacturing organizations increasingly need to understand what is happening right now and to be able to forecast what is likely to happen in both the near future and the long term. They also need to share metrics and information with the supply chain to ensure continuity of operations.
Unfortunately, they are unlikely to be able to do so by relying on the spreadsheets that our benchmark research into analytics in manufacturing finds are being used in almost two-thirds of organizations (63%). A substantial majority (92%) use them universally or regularly, yet the research found that doing so leads to analytics that take longer to generate and are less accurate. Clearly there is a reason why three in five (60%) manufacturing organizations say it is very important to make it simpler to provide analytics and metrics to all who need them.