How Business Intelligence (BI) Solution Can Reduce Time Spent On Data Manipulation

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Technology everywhere is transforming businesses. From filling cola bottles to flying an aeroplane, most processes in executing these tasks are automated. Whether an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) or their bigger counterparts, every stakeholder is interested in knowing how to streamline processes, increase efficiencies and boost productivity. Wherever there is technology, data comes along with it. The best thing about data: It can offer a wealth of critical/business information. This data is often crying-out-loud to be analysed and broken down to unlock the hidden insights in it. With businesses understanding the need for big data analytics, we look at how beverage companies can leverage the available data to unlock key insights.

How filling cola bottles can offer valuable business insights?

Yes, filling cola bottles offers vital business insights that transforms and adapts cola plants for years to come. Most cola plants today are equipped with completely automated packaging lines. These packaging lines have automated dispensers and fillers and they put the precise amount of cola into every bottle. Certainly dispensers and fillers have a business logic written in them to perform such functions precisely. In terms of Business intelligence, the dispensers, fillers and production monitoring systems are data sources. From these data sources, manufacturers can gain insights. BI provides granular details of bottling processes.

Few examples of parameters, BI offers about the bottling process.

  • Number of bottles filled per minute
  • Different in Quantity per bottle
  • Time taken to fill each bottle

These parameters mainly talk about production efficiency. BI can generate reports and data visualizations that track, monitor, and evaluate the packaging lines. These reports will help to identify bottlenecks and issues in real-time. By knowing these parameters, manufacturers can further refine and optimize their production processes. Most of the parameters are directly linked to procurement and will influence the complete supply-chain of the bottling processes. Using ITlytics, a premier data analytics and visualization platform can be further tightly integrated with multiple systems to create extensively detailed dashboards. Such dashboards offer complete overview and end-to-end information of the bottling plant in real time.

Can we do more with BI rather than monitoring, identifying and eliminating bottlenecks?

With data by its side, BI offers a plenty of insights. We can do much more than gathering metrics and insights. BI allows to model data in multiple ways, depicts various business scenarios. Most commonly modelled scenarios have been the best and worst scenarios. By depicting various business scenarios, organizations will be ready to adapt and align themselves to different operating conditions and frequencies. Learn how to refine and optimize the operations based on these scenarios. Essentially, predict and forecast to foresee the future. And then adapt the business according to it.

What happens when Business Intelligence is done manually?

BI systems and tools allow organizations to seamlessly consolidate data from multiple sources. Earlier “Organizations would manually gather, consolidate, and transform data”. Further with the transformed data, reports were generated manually. This meant employees spending hours together to perform BI related actions, such as data entry. A lot of manual interventions attract repetitions and duplications. Imagine each department of an organization generating its own version of report, each version narrating a half-baked story. At this point BI becomes very lengthy and laborious process. Such that organizations will have tough time while making effective and consistent decisions.

Why spend time doing things manually: Business Intelligence tools can do it all!

When data manipulation is done manually, most of the time is spent copying and editing data at all points, also involving manual calculations. While in BI, most of the work around data is performed behind the scenes/ in the backend. BI is then ready to generate the dashboards and reports based on the data gathered from different systems. Now the stage is set, to model data by keying in the value/number in a single data point. This automatically transforms the values at all other data points depending on the keyed value.

With transformed business data, BI generates dashboards and reports for the designed data model. Further organizations can draw comparisons between various data models. And they will have greater visibility on impact of business processes with reference to multiple data models. These attributes and insights also influence Total cost of ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI).

By continuing the cola bottling example, let’s understand how data manipulation works. Based on the emerging trends, the cola manufacturer understands the demand for mini cola bottles. The packaging lines are designed to manufacture bigger cola bottles. Now in order to align and adapt the packaging lines for mini bottles, a series of precise changes is required.

With BI at helm, the manufacturer just needs to modify the value of the quantity per bottle. The BI tool will start manipulating the quantity in terms of time required to fill each bottle and the precise amount of sugar, water, and cola syrups to be put into mini bottles. And generate dashboards and data visualizations by leveraging a powerful analytics platform like ITlytics.

If the same activity had to be performed manually minus BI and data manipulation, it would take at least few months to get up and running. Minus BI, a lot of trial and error runs would have to be conducted affecting production. A huge number of manual changes would have to be done at all systems. The number of permutations and combinations of these changes would be very high. The whole process of redesigning the packaging lines to accommodate mini bottles becomes complex and tiresome.

Leverage and Manipulate data: For a better tomorrow

With BI and precise information at hand, the manufacturer needs to set the required values at each system and run a few trials. To get up and running with mini bottles. Not that perfection is achieved at once, but the number of trials is reduced by a greater margin. The manufacturer can also explore the possibilities of further optimizing the packaging lines.

It is time for organization to leverage BI and harness business information. Business intelligence helps organizations to make quick and informed decisions. An effective decision paves way for continuous growth and sustainability. Data manipulation helps organizations to look at themselves at various stages or in the coming years.