Solving the most perennial business problems requires companies to evolve their approach to Data and Analytics. Leading manufacturers are applying Advanced Data and Analytics across the value chain - optimising supply chain performance, improving manufacturing flexibility, developing new products rapidly, helping address environmental and sustainability concerns while balancing costs.

Underpinned by a strong data-driven culture, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics challenge traditional paradigms and enable business leaders to make quicker more informed decisions, breaking down traditional functional and process silos, to unlock new levels of performance.

Key discussion points 

1) Justifying Your Advanced/Predictive Analytics Programme can be difficult but can be done if approached correctly

a) Attaching an ROI argument to Advanced/Predictive Analytics can be very dangerous. It’s still a very new area and part of dipping the organisational toe into this area will involve being careful not to stifle experimentation and POCs because of ROI considerations. 

b) This can make the fundamental business case for investment very difficult – which is perhaps why starting small, with easy-to-understand use-cases, and being clear on the key KPIs, is so important.

c) Starting small also allows your team to build experience and develop ways of working that support your nascent Advanced Analytics capability.

2) Remember “Success is a relative term”

a) Remember to measure and communicate the value of what you achieve, this helps to justify any future investment asks.

b) Not everything works, but as long teams are learning from their mistakes and incorporating those learnings into future pieces of work – they aren’t wasted initiatives. 

c) Having specific, well understood, and well communicated KPIs around failure rates can help with this. These metrics can show volume of work being done to ‘tease out the gems’ as well as setting expectations that failure is part of the journey to value. Shown alongside value metrics, this will communicate the real story of the journey.

3) Humans must remain part of the overall Advanced & Predictive Analytics value chain

a) When building the delivery team, the business has to be involved and invested in the process – as they will be the ones who provide the problems to solve and use-cases to investigate. Ultimately, this is a team sport and siloing your people along organisational lines will not bring the best results.

b) Even when a Predictive or Advanced Analytics solution is deployed, having humans within the value chain remains key to success. The insight and experience humans bring is invaluable in making improvements. For example, in a predictive maintenance process, any recommendations made from a model must be scrutinised by an expert to weed out false positives – as downtime impacts productivity and therefore potentially revenue. Having that checkpoint and a feedback loop into the development team is as important as having enough data to test and train the predictive models in the first place. 

c) These kinds of solutions don’t replace people, they simply turbo charge the decision making.

d) Ultimately this is all about improving the quality and speed of decision making – being able to make more good decisions more quickly! And that is the whole point of attempting to become a data-driven digital business.

The Summary:

• Start small, so you can get moving quickly and gain experience.

• Establish clear ways of working across all the team players needed. The initial simple use-cases will provide the groundwork for this.

• Advanced & Predictive Analytics is a team sport. This means any capability must have representatives which reflect the makeup of the whole organisation; siloes do not lead to success.

• Aim to show value quickly and measure it – which means any initiative must be directly linked to business problems and goals. 

• Learn lessons and feed them back into the next iteration. It’s OK to make mistakes but make sure you have the right structure & reporting to show why.

• Wash-up, then move onto the next challenge.

Ultimately, this is not an easy journey, but don’t be afraid, the results are worth the effort.

Want to know more about how to optimise your manufacturing business? Check out our pdf downloads below.