Manufacturing and logistics companies have vast amounts of big data that is often underutilized in their operational decision making. This Dark Data, as Gartner defines it, is “the information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes (for example, analytics, business relationships and direct monetizing)”. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed this gap in many organizations, and companies are ramping up their utilization of big data to catch up to competitors. Carton Sapp, managing vice president of the data analytics for a technical professional team at Gartner, says “through the ability to connect all these disparate data sets, companies can use relational graphs that display an occurrence or a pattern within a broader context. The opportunities to add context to supply chain workflow at the machinery level is a game changer” in this article by MHI.
“With that global crisis exposing major global supply chain weaknesses across nearly every market sector in 2020, companies have prioritized Big Data” says Carol Miller, MHI VP of Marketing and Communications. Big data can be utilized in different areas of a manufacturer’s operations, including production, warehousing, freight, and yard management. Identifying the suppliers or part numbers that cause you the most disruptions, for example, can help you reduce the costs associated with down production lines and manual tracking of incidents. If you have data showing what trailers have been sitting out in the yard the longest or where a specific load is in your supply chain, you can prioritize the trucks to unload, increase warehouse fill rates, and ultimately boost customer satisfaction.
Knowing how to gather and utilize all the data you have can be the biggest challenge in your quest to be a more cost effective and efficient manufacturing organization. StrataFlows has taken on this challenge in its cloud-based platform designed to proactively plan for and keep up with changes in material movement and supply chain. Our platform is an incident command center allowing users to have end-to-end real-time visibility when a part goes missing or a supplier is late during changes in supply. We help clients stay resilient in these times by keeping production flowing by tracking suppliers, demand, and issues by utilizing the data they already have in their existing systems and give them the tools they need to take action. The Issue Tracker module, along with its built-in reporting and dashboarding capabilities, helps our clients keep their continuous improvement goals by giving visibility and collaboration tools to stay agile in a changing market. Click here to for a free trial of StrataFlows.
