At present, manufacturers across the world are struggling to maximize their production capacities because of disrupted supply chains. The new remote work trend and the suppressed demand are the key reasons behind supply chain disruptions. This crisis is forcing most manufacturers to revise their operational strategies through technology adoption.

Business Intelligence tech strategy has been proved as pivotal for the manufacturers seeking to accelerate Industry 4.0 adoption. Most organizations are accelerating their transformation plans with the deployment of tools like Power BI within their infrastructure. With this tool, manufacturers can increase productivity and instill agility and flexibility in their operations. Power BI for manufacturers is not just about centralizing data from multiple sources but also standardizing manufacturing analytics for crucial operations.

The Value of Power BI in Manufacturing Analytics

Industry 4.0 is about instituting intelligence across different processes in manufacturing operations. The industry 4.0 model has data and insights at the core supported by smart technologies. Manufacturing analytics regulated by Power BI can help stakeholders customize products, improve production and quality, visualize inventory, and launch profitable business models. Also, it helps manufacturers overcome two predominant challenges like:

Inconsistent Data Utilization – Manufacturers are able to collect data from many sources, formats, and processes. But the inconsistency in them makes it difficult to generate the appropriate insights. With Power BI-driven manufacturing analytics, users can collect structured data and process it for further insights.
Incompatibility – The disparate production systems, ERPs, and project management tools in manufacturing infrastructure are less likely to support integration. This makes analyses complex and humongous. Whereas Power BI enables business users to connect disparate sources and make data sharing and analyzing easier.

The traditional analytics tools and systems don’t keep up with the varying needs of manufacturers. In contrast, Power BI helps in setting up a data-driven culture. However, for effective manufacturing analytics and visualizations, businesses should consider collaborating with a Microsoft Power BI consulting services provider.

Revising Manufacturing Processes with Power BI Consultants

It is evident that manufacturing processes are multi-faceted, from quality production and inventory to supply chain and logistics. It comprises of numerous complex processes, and assessing data is always complex. With Power BI consultants, manufacturers can create reports and dashboards powered with AI and extract actionable insights quickly. The consultants help manufacturers reduce time on inspections/analysis and minimize redundancy. This consequently improves decision-making capabilities and cognizance of manufacturing leaders and executives.

Let’s look at a few areas where manufacturing analytics is employed by Power BI consultants:

Demand Forecasting – End-user preferences tend to vary quickly, and manufacturers are repetitively affected. To forecast varying scenarios, Power BI consultants prepare demand planning and forecasting reports. These reports help stakeholders understand: What will be the upcoming product line that end-users desire in the future? Which products generate the better profitability?
Vendor Analysis – Another major inefficiency that manufacturers deal with is the disruptions from raw material vendors. Power BI consultants build Vendor Analysis models with What-if analysis logic. This helps manufacturers analyze the risks in raw material supply and mitigate it through proper classification. These models also improve collaboration opportunities between manufacturing executives and vendors.
Stock Planning – Maintaining precise inventory levels is crucial in fulfilling the user demands and the manufacturers’ viability. Predicting the stock levels for the future and maintaining the threshold levels to fulfill the user demand can be done at ease with Power BI consultants.
Last-mile Delivery – The idea of last-mile delivery is gaining prominence in a modern manufacturing environment since it helps in maintaining the value of a complete supply chain. Ensuring seamless delivery largely depends on logistics and transportation analysis. Understanding this, Power BI consultants build ‘Just in Time’ dashboards by leveraging Artificial Intelligence and IoT to provide sophisticated insights for each supply chain process.

6 Reasons to Work with Skilled Power BI Consultants

1. Reduce Supply Chain Inefficiencies

On-time product deliveries and huge shipping expenses became crucial with varying commerce and end-user expectations. To balance these aspects, experts from a Power BI consulting firm build and deploy supply chain dashboards. These dashboards enable manufacturers to visualize their ideal route planning data, transportation expenses, consignment charges, and vendor contracts through a single interface. The insights about each shipment allow manufacturers to evaluate shipment performance and modify contracts. For complex supply chain operations, Power BI consultants gain insights based on real-time and historical data, proactively address issues, and boost performance.

2. Automated Inventory Management

Maintaining the ideal inventory level without hampering manufacturing operations minimizes costs while also guaranteeing better product margins. With Power BI consultants, manufacturers can generate automated inventory reports without overwhelming the executives to prepare multiple reports at a time. This is possible by building data pipelines for inventory management. By setting up this pipeline, consultants ensure that stakeholders or manufacturers can prepare inventory threshold and status reports at any instance. This enables manufacturers to analyze inventory data at large, alert specific teams during defective inventory, stock in/stock out conditions, and take further decisions.

This pipeline helps manufacturers lessen inventory costs by monitoring stock levels and visualizing the availability in a single view. Manufacturers can also ensure that quality raw materials and products are available at all localities. Apart from the real-time visualization of the stock level availability, inventory management pipelines effectively analyze production needs and on-time materials procurement.

3. Extensive Predictive Analytics

Like every other sector, predictive analytics offers greater value to the manufacturing industry. Data is increasing drastically in every manufacturing function and process.

How manufacturers can use this data effectively?

The most common way is leveraging historical data to forecast the future. Predictive analytics in manufacturing is not just limited to demand forecasting but it can be used for assessing production cycles, inventory planning, workforce optimization, resource consumption, and scope envisioning. Power BI consultants make use of Power Query, advanced AI/ML capabilities, in-built integrations, data visualizations, DAX, and a lot more to obtain insights quickly.

4. Quality Equipment Assessment

Forecasting the manufacturing machine’s maintenance and downtime turns out to be an effective way to improve equipment utilization. With IoT-based sensors being largely used by manufacturers, Power BI consultants can evaluate the live feeds and update the stakeholders with upcoming maintenance issues and operational insights.

Product quality is now a crucial factor in winning user trust and fulfillment. Manual reviewing is not a practical option anymore. That’s why Power BI consultants help manufacturers to proactively analyze the vital factors and data patterns to deliver insights regarding deviations from the standard product-defining data and features. A detailed analysis of the processes through data can give end-to-end transparency into quality metrics.

5. Financial Management

Any initiative remains incomplete without a return-on-investment analysis. With Power BI consultants, manufacturers can conduct cost-benefit analyses across the process and product lifecycle. Budget planning for engineering, operations, sales promotion, marketing, and inventory controlling can be visualized and predicted with appealing reports and dashboards in Power BI. A more thorough analysis of expenses, sales growth, and revenue factors allows manufacturers to focus on the related top and bottom-line activities.

6. Optimizing Overall Operations

As stated before, manufacturing comes with many interrelated processes, and the information needs to be collated for efficient operations. Scheduling the production lines employees, utilizing the engineering capacities, and marketing and sales functions are not just individual utilities but also the information flows across these functions.

Microsoft Power BI partners can perform wider analysis of target vs. real production, plant efficiencies, raw material, and remote monitoring. Besides just analyzing the data and revealing insights, Power BI specialists improve data connectivity across manufacturing facilities, vendors, and global locations.

Summing Up

As manufacturing businesses look for innovative ways to boost production and modernize industrial operations, Power BI for manufacturing offers an easy solution to overcome complexities and accelerate growth. Power BI consultants empower manufacturers to find the most practical manufacturing KPIs and visualize data in insightful and incredible ways.

How Power Bi Partners Empower Decision-Making for Manufacturers