The Problem with Business Intelligence in Manufacturing Management

Market demand is forcing the need for sophisticated Business Intelligence (BI) tools down into the organizational depths of even mid-sized companies. And although data rich environments such as Retail and Finance were the first to incorporate Business Intelligence techniques, rapid changes in operating environments is presaging their use in Manufacturing as well. The term BI used to describe big picture, "insight" tools, but Business Intelligence associated technology such as neural networks and decision trees are now tackling operational decision support. In Manufacturing, the need is definitely there: global sourcing, rapidly fluctuating energy costs, ever higher inventory carrying costs, all contribute to an increasing desire to access the kind of sophisticated decision support that Business Intelligence can provide. But BI in support of Manufacturing is still hampered by substantial shortcomings:

Price and Scope

Integrated Business Intelligence tends to be a very big ticket, big company item. The undisputed overall leader in BI technologies, SAS, provides software that integrates data from every corner of an enterprise to deliver "fit to task" intelligence, but its price tag puts it functionally out of reach of all but very large corporations. On the other hand, "spot" solutions - less integrated and more functionally confined - are still far and few between and continue to suffer from their own shortcomings.

Usability

Most Business Intelligence tools operate without knowledge of the underlying domains they're investigating. They analyze data for relationships without "understanding" the manufacturing processes the data arises from. Since outputs may be far from intuitive, power users are critical to ensure correct interpretation. Gartner VP Howard Dresser, observes " While some inroads have been made to bring BI out of corporate strategic planning and into operations, BI has lived, to a great extent, in the very rarified world of statisticians and analysts." Without the fail safe of technologically savvy users, Business Intelligence's ability to deliver executional support remains hampered.

Lack of Integration with Business Processes

Forrester analyst Keith Gile recently argued that Business Intelligence's lack of integration is itself a drawback, stating, "Today's BI vendor products lack a consistent mechanism for defining, managing and implementing or inheriting prescribed business processes from external applications". Gile argues that this renders BI-based performance management useful only to a handful of employees targeting strategic initiatives based exclusively on the available data, and not the processes that the data supports.

For the masses, true usability may mean combining Business Intelligence technology with common applications, integrating BI with existing business systems and processes. BI that's as easily deployed and rolled out as a new desktop application.

Business Intelligence has long proven itself invaluable in database information enhancement and exploitation in the retail and banking industries. To be truly useful in Manufacturing, BI will need to be intimately and constantly informed by the manufacturing environment's existing technology information structure. That may best be accomplished by embedding Business Intelligence into the system itself.