The Manufacturing Industry’s Unique Data Challenges
Manufacturers striving to boost productivity must grapple with the challenges of managing data—its massive volumes, complex formats, questionable quality, and many sources.
Manufacturers need to be able to access, integrate, and trust their information assets so they can increase operational efficiency, better manage regulatory compliance, and improve product performance.
Increase Operational Efficiency
To compete in the global economy, your manufacturing firm must pursue maximum ROI in its factories by cutting operational costs. You may be exploring technologies such as global data synchronization (GDS) and radio frequency identification (RFID) to improve your ability to manage inventory, facilitate manufacturing processes, control the supply chain, and improve relationships with vendors and customers.
As critical as these technologies are to streamlining your manufacturing business, they also generate vast amounts of complex data from multiple sources. How can you ensure that the data is consistent, clean, and ready to use as business conditions change? How can you pull together a consistent overview of your customers, products, suppliers, and operations—all the factors on which you base key business decisions—to optimize ROI and generate additional profit?
Informatica can help.
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“Growth and acquisition has demanded that we remain flexible. At the core of that is our technology platform. Using Informatica’s technology and Velocity Methodology, we converted customer, vendor, and material data to SAP and consolidated the customer data base. At the same time, we cleansed the data—all within six months. As a result, we have streamlined our processes and improved the efficiency of conducting business with our partners.”
- Donnie Steward
CIO, ACH Foods Company | |
Better Manage Regulatory Compliance
In addition to a wide range of requirements for corporate governance, labor practices, and environmental protection, your manufacturing firm may face regulations, such as food and drug safety or transportation rules, specific to your products or manufacturing processes. Only clear audit trails and clean, reliable data from multiple systems will help your company avoid the risk of incurring penalties for noncompliance.
How does your company track multiple datatypes and formats across disparate systems to meet regulatory requirements? How do you ensure that the data is consistent, reliable, and auditable so you can generate accurate reports? How do you spot and alert managers to potential compliance issues in real time?
Informatica can help.
Improve Product Performance
Customer service means delivering the products customers want, when they want them—a process that demands that manufacturers spot and act on customer preferences faster than ever. Yet your company must also balance the need for research and development against the costs of failed or underperforming products.
How does your company measure its ROI on R&D? How does it track and act on quality control from concept to production? How does it incorporate multiple sources of data—for example, customer feedback, sales figures, inventory data, and product information—into one holistic view of product performance? How does it leverage that data to shorten time to market and increase customer satisfaction?
Informatica can help.
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“As a direct result of the rollout of Dial’s Informatica-powered data warehouse, we now have a more detailed focus on core products in terms of sales and service performance. Data warehousing has also completely changed the way Dial manages data as a company, and has indirectly affected the entire organization’s performance and growth.”
- Paul Cunningham
Vice President of Data Warehousing, Dial Corporation | |