In many manufacturing operations, the words reporting and analytics are used interchangeably. This misconception prevents many from utilizing the two concepts correctly and to their full potential. Although both reporting and analytics use the same data, and are equally important, they serve different purposes. Understanding the intent of each concept is critical for equipping your operations to make smarter decisions, increase value, and unlock deeper intelligence to elevate your operations to the next level, including manufacturing analytics and reporting.

The Basics Behind Reporting

Production reports, especially those with manually collected data, primarily tell you the ‘here and now’ and what happened in the last shift or day. Reporting extracts of data from various sources allows comparisons, and makes the information more accessible via summarized and visualized  data in tables, charts, and dashboards. Advanced reporting tools allow ad-hoc queries, drill down viewing, and comparisons across various data dimensions.

Reporting is valuable and needed, but it falls short of analytics. 

Understanding Analytics

Analytics, on the other hand, goes beyond reporting to bring answers to questions and provide a blueprint for actions required. Reports inform you about what is happening and help  transform the raw data your business collects into a readable format. Analytics focuses on exploring and interpreting data or reports to glean valuable insight into why specific trends happened the way they did.

The goal of analytics is to interpret the information.

In recent years, analytical reporting in the manufacturing industry has evolved into one of the most valuable intelligence sources, as it provides clear trends that management and executives can leverage to make smart recommendations and decisions.

With advances in manufacturing analytics software, operations can automatically analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

Manufacturing Analytics and Reporting: Boost Efficiency With the Right Manufacturing Analytics Software

Manufacturing Analytics Software allows manufacturers to find the right problem offenders by slicing data in as many ways as you can imagine.

You may have teams dedicated to analyzing and optimizing Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and throughput. However, with basic reporting, you’re only catching issues that are easily visible to your production teams or evident in your quality/Continuous Improvement (CI) data.

This gives you a false sense that you’re focusing your efforts on the correct problems, while undetected issues may be recurring every day in front of you, quietly eating away at your margins.

With manufacturing analytics software, you can measure a specific downtime reason by machine, shift, area, machine type, work order, and countless other measures. You can trend virtually on any production Key Performance Indicator (KPI) or work order, at any granularity. This allows you to monitor the true effectiveness of improvement initiatives and  identify new areas for improvement,  ensuring your work orders are carried out efficiently.

3 Benefits of Manufacturing Analytics Software

1. Intuitive Dashboards for Root Cause Analysis

Executive dashboard views in manufacturing analytics software enable  executives  to see what they care about, at the right context level – for example, quarterly trends can be viewed at a plant-wide level, across multiple geographic locations. They’ll see all their plants, no matter where they’re located in the world).

CI and quality teams can tap into trends around your downtime reasons. Machine states here are a bit less important than the reason behind the machine state. In other words, you want to create an interactive analysis where you can start at a downtime machine state, then drill down into downtime reasons by duration, and then plot your top 5 reasons for a trend graph.

2. Competitive Advantage

Continuous improvement initiatives are increasingly leveraging big data analytics as a critical tool for root cause analysis and advancing manufacturing operations. Big data analytics software can help companies innovate how they operate, how they work with customers and suppliers, and how they identify new opportunities for revenue generation.

3. Lower Production Costs

An enterprise-wide manufacturing analytics platform can reduce costs and expenses in various areas – a big one being preventative maintenance. Others include reducing inventory levels and reducing the amount of manual labor.

For manufacturers, future-proofing operations and remaining competitive in this ever-changing market mean having reporting and analytics working hand-in-hand. You can’t have one without the other, and a dedicated manufacturing analytics software encompasses both these concepts to create blueprints for the course of action that can be taken.

It starts with the raw data and organizes it in a digestible manner through automated, detailed reports within the system. The reports make it easier for analytics to uncover any problems within the organization and provide the solutions.

Shoplogix Manufacturing Analytics Software

Shoplogix is at the forefront of IIoT Smart Factory and big data analytics software developments. To help our customers easily create, edit, and share reports, Shoplogix will soon release its own Manufacturing Analytics Software as part of our leading IIoT Smart Factory platform.

As a built-in reporting and analytics feature, manufacturers will receive all the capabilities that third-party analytics tools offer, including interactive dashboards and email scheduling, except everything is already configured and connected to your machines. All your machine and OEE data are always available in one place and automatically refreshed on out-of-the-box analytics dashboards. This eliminates the need for additional formatting or data manipulation.

Final Thoughts

The distinction between reporting and analytics is crucial for modern manufacturing operations. While reporting provides valuable insights into the current state of operations, analytics goes a step further by interpreting data, identifying trends, and providing actionable intelligence. 

The advancement of manufacturing analytics software has revolutionized operations by enabling the automatic analysis of large data volumes. This leads to numerous benefits, including intuitive dashboards for root cause analysis, gaining a competitive edge, and reducing production costs. Embracing both reporting and analytics equips manufacturers to future-proof their operations and maintain competitiveness in an ever-changing market.