AMD had a familiar story to all manufacturers. The owner of the company wanted information in order to make a business decision. Not having the information he went to his CFO to ask for the information. The CFO wasn’t familiar enough with how the data was collected and stored and went to a user. The user struggled to extract the information and in the end went back to IT with a request for a custom report. IT came back 4 weeks later but by that time the information was stale.
Delays in gathering and analyzing data acquired from the value chain hinder decision-making, leading to waste and higher operational costs. In a world in which manufacturers need to improve their margins through better resource management, increased asset performance and strategic initiatives such as condition-based maintenance and enhanced quality management. The ‘old-school’ method of reporting just does not make any sense.
AMD was able to improve their operational agility by plugging in their data into Microsoft’s Business Intelligence solution. This allowed them to see trends, create ad-hoc reports on the fly and even ask natural questions to the computer…..all without being in IT or a programmer.
