Effective Usage of Analytics and Business Intelligence
Contract management is crucial in manufacturing industry, as product cost varies with commodity price. We contract flour, wheat, milk, egg and many commodities with six months to 24+ months out. Often time we extend same contract agreement from one term to another depending on our demand and volatility in commodity prices. The Finance team needs visibility of future commodity costs, so that they can quote to the customer for finished products .Contract management is crucial in manufacturing industry, as our product cost varies with commodity price. We contract flour, wheat, milk, egg and many commodities with six months to 24+ months out. Often time we extend same contract agreement from one term to another depending on our demand and volatility in commodity prices. The Finance team needs visibility of future commodity costs, so that they can quote to the customer for finished products.

We have built sophisticated analytics around contract management using the Microsoft BI stack. We use data from our ERP systems and industry trends reports. We have developed various analytic reports and OLAP cubes in MS SSRS and SSAS; which allow our Procurement and Finance teams to make better business decisions. Operational excellence depends upon how efficiently we manage our supply chain finance. We have built finance analytics using MS BI Stack where the ERP system feeds information to the MS SQL Server. We also feed information from other user driven applications which are built in .Net architecture. Some of the MS SSAS cubes are built every 30 minutes. Finance team uses this BI tool to analyze monthly expenses, manage actual/flex budget, perform head count analysis and overhead planning. Finance also uses the BI tool to track how a plant initiative is performing against the promised ROI in a specific time period. This information is available to the corporate OPEX team who can then slice and dice the data on various dimensions like safety, off quality etc. to come up with recommendation for process improvement. We have built Sales Analysis tool in Microsoft BI stack to help CSM Sales and Finance teams. ERP information is fed to SQL Server on a daily basis. Various OLAP cubes are built out of this information which is used by corporate business users and sales representative in the field. Corporate Finance and Sales team have the capability to analyze sales data in customer/ item/ region with PTD, YTD, Year-to-Year and other time dimensions. The tool also provides granular information about rebate, brokerage commission and many other attributes. The tool is also used to build pricing models. Sales representative can get sales trend of their areas of responsibilities (territory/ customer) and build their action items. We have built role based authority, so that a sales rep can only see his/her area of responsibility. Having a correct Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) across all plants directly impacts operational excellence. We have implemented third party CMMS solution in a plant which provides various functionalities including preventative maintenance, inventory management, expiration of important documents like vendor insurance, warranty and the like. Analytics around them helps plant management to take action like scheduling maintenance before it affects normal production run, reaching out to vendor to procure renewed insurance and taking proactive action on specific inventory before it runs out. Savings in the plant where we have implemented this system has been significant compared to a plant without the benefit of this CMMS system. We are in a process of implanting the same CMMS tool across all plants in the US. We are planning to implement the same systems across the globe depending on the plant size.
In summary, our approach of blended development between in-house work and third party hosted solution helps our business community realize the benefits of analytics quickly. It is always a challenge when deciding what will be the right approach when we address a new business issue. We use internal ROI matrices to make our decisions. We are always actively looking into addressing more functional areas which can benefit from the power of analytics.
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