When the timing is no longer an option!

The volumes and activities of European manufacturing companies have proved to be declining for the third consecutive month! And the trend in new orders doesn’t suggest a rosy future for the next quarter.

In such a context, with the unrelenting competition from emerging markets and with increasingly demanding customers, the manufacturing activity is extremely complex, especially in the profitability targets that allow the investments and the development needed to maintain quality standards that have always characterized the products and services in the Eurozone.

As never before, top managers need now to adopt a "measured" and "fast" decision making process. But effective analysis of internal and external dynamics, that is necessary to the decision making process, is always more difficult, especially in the manufacturing sector: if the industrial automation has improved the efficiency of production processes, at the same time it has generated a huge amount of data. IT departments have managed in most cases to exploit hardware innovations to "stock" the amount of data, but there is still a significant gap that often prevents the transformation of data into information.

A key lever for optimizing the performance is represented by the deep awareness of how products and customers absorb the resources used. This causes an increasing attention to the sophisticated techniques of analysis of costs and profitability. This means going from the pure sphere of production processes, to include other key areas such as supply chain, auxiliary functions and infrastructure. Understanding the cost structure and margins of the sensitivity to movements in demand is a critical element of the entire decision-making process.

To understand how the granularity of the data can be accessed strategically, just think of those companies, which are increasing, which customize the products or distribution methods according to the customer. In these cases, only an extremely detailed information allows techniques such as Transactional ABC and then the analysis of profitability up to the micro-level of individual customer, or even to a single sales transaction.

In this context, the use of advanced techniques of Performance Management, supported by Business Intelligence environments covering the entire supply chain, can lead to process efficiencies, reduction of production cycles (and therefore the "time-to-market") and in general to a better ability to adapt manufacturing company to an increasingly dynamic and complex market.

SDG - Manufacturing & Logistics focuses on these objectives and has developed a competence center to "accelerate" the adoption of the proper solution. Keep Moving Forward!