Kerrie Jordan is the Group Vice President, Product Management at Epicor.
Peter Drucker’s famous leadership adage states, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” In today’s world, where competition is higher than ever, with more resources, processes and people to manage, manufacturing organizations must have robust ways to measure what’s happening so they can manage it properly.
Data insights can help you run your organization more efficiently, provide better products to customers and be ready for the competitive future of manufacturing. Yet many organizations don’t have the tools and technology in place to gather, integrate and analyze the data being produced—which will hinder their efforts for growth, innovation and operational excellence.
By embracing a data-first strategy, manufacturing leaders can improve operations today to better prepare for the future. Here’s how to embark upon a data-first strategy for your organization.
What A Data-First Strategy Is
To stay competitive today, manufacturing leaders need efficient processes, well-managed employees, well-spent budgets and streamlined means through which to grow and scale. The decisions behind these initiatives can either be backed by guesswork or can be backed by data.
Adopting a data-first strategy means using the insights produced by your organization’s data to drive your decision-making. However, the majority of enterprises today are trying to manage overwhelming amounts of data—at least 5 petabytes of data, 80% of which is unstructured (pg. 5). Often their data is siloed or they simply don’t have the tools and technology in place to gather, organize and analyze their data.
However, by interpreting signals and indicators within your business and across your supply chain, you’ll gain actionable insights into your operations, which will drive optimization. According to an article from the Harvard Division of Continuing Education, “The majority of business leaders say that collecting and analyzing data leads to faster, more effective decision-making.”
The Top Three Benefits Of A Data-First Strategy
In our recent survey of 400 manufacturing leaders, 2 out of 3 say that their organization already embraces a data-first strategy. Of those that do, they’ve found the biggest benefits of doing so are the following.
1. Improved Customer Experience And Loyalty
Those who adopt a data-first strategy say the biggest benefit is greater customer loyalty and an improved customer experience. A data-first strategy can improve business agility and the automation of business processes, products and services.
Data can show how well your production cycles run so that you’re able to deliver products on time to customers. Data also helps you understand how your budgets are being used so you can keep prices competitive. Customers will ultimately be loyal to companies that deliver quality goods on time and for the right price.
2. Faster Time To Value
By using data platforms to analyze production, manufacturing leaders can maintain quality and compliance and be sure that they’re using high-quality, cost-efficient materials. Tracking and forecasting supply chain issues enable organizations to put alternate plans in place so that production doesn’t stop and so that products are available for customers. Efficient operations are a critical component to creating high-quality products, which create more value for customers.
3. Better Sustainability Management And Monitoring
Taking steps to implement and increase sustainability efforts in manufacturing is a priority today. Organizations can move to renewable energy sources, invest in more energy-efficient technology or switch to more eco-friendly materials in their products.
Tracking these initiatives puts quantifiable numbers to your sustainability efforts. Using data to uncover your failure points means that you can take action to decrease your waste and improve your energy consumption.
How To Get Started With A Data-First Strategy
For those looking to launch a data-first strategy in 2024, here are six foundational steps to follow to get started.
Step 1: Evaluating Your Baseline
Start your data-first journey by understanding where your organization currently stands on data collection and the systems that gather it. Jump-start your internal change by naming a data champion to lead your initiatives.
Step 2: Defining Business Objectives And KPIs
Next, define your goals for data collection and analysis. Determining what questions you want your data to answer can guide what you collect, how you collect it and what key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll track within that data.
Step 3: Understanding What Data You Have And What You Don’t
Your various internal systems likely already collect a fair amount of data. As you inventory your current state, determine what data you’re already collecting that aligns with your objectives. Then, make a plan to collect the data that will fill in the missing pieces. Include in that plan data governance and hygiene strategies as well.
Step 4: Choosing The Right Tools To Support Your Efforts
You may find that your data collection and management is siloed across departments and that there’s little transparency to the whole data story across your organization. Now’s the time to invest in tools and technology that integrate various data streams and consolidate them into a single-source-of-truth platform or hub.
If you don’t yet have the budget for a best-in-class data management platform, look for open-source options to begin with that consolidate your data and give you visibility into your data landscape. Look for free or open-source data analytics tools as well so that you don’t miss out on useful insights.
Step 5: Building A Cross-Company Data Team
IT isn’t the only team responsible for your data-first strategy. As you build your initiatives, make your data-first strategy a holistic one that extends across teams. Be sure to leverage either current talent or new hires who have data expertise, especially in analysis.
Step 6: Understanding That It’s A Journey
Shifting your processes and culture to data-first will take time, effort, budgets and learning from failure. Focus your team on the benefits a data-first strategy will bring and how it will prepare you for the future of your industry.
Deciding On Data-First
Are you able to effectively manage because you’re measuring? Gathering data from across your organization means greater visibility into your operations and processes. Knowing how your processes function means you’re able to manage them and create more optimization for future growth and industry impact.
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