Time and cost savings through the implementation of self-service analytics

The challenge

Business Need

The Client’s engineering team who supports a certain factory was spending a significant amount of effort on the cutting, pasting, and sorting of stoppage and loss data from their production lines. They needed to do so in order to compile prioritised Root Cause Analysis reports and facilitate the daily, weekly, and monthly action planning meetings.

Objectivity was asked to propose a solution, which would eliminate the need to manually manipulate data. Prior to the realisation of the project, the Client’s engineering team had to fill out Excel spreadsheets and the organisation was looking for a way to optimise this process. The goal was to enable the engineering team to utilise their time better on planning and undertaking the steps necessary to minimise future stoppages and losses.

With these goals in mind, Objectivity proposed a solution based on Microsoft Power BI (PBI), which is a leading Business Analytics solution.

The solution

Project Details

Objectivity started with an in-depth analysis of the Client’s current solution. Working closely with business end users, Objectivity’s development team defined the measures and functionalities that would be required in the future solution.

The development team delivered an SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) flow for daily data imports from different Excel spreadsheets and databases and built a new database that contains data gathered from distributed data sources.

On top of that, the team built a complex data model in Power BI and designed professional, user-friendly, and interactive dashboards. As a result of having improved data visualisation and dashboard composition, users can now focus on data analysis rather than on searching and processing information.

Using a decluttering method based on the Cognitive Load Concept and Gestalt Principles, the development team aimed to make dashboard communication easier for the audience to process.

Additionally, they built the comments functionality in Power BI to enable users to track notes related to the dashboards.

The results

Business Benefits

The new SSIS data flow and Power BI self-service interactive dashboards have been successfully deployed and now support the Client’s engineering team in stoppage and loss data analysis.

The dashboards deliver up-to-date information quickly and automatically. Having all the information in one database and using parameters in a single combined report enables customers to easily generate views for the selected production line and period (day, week, or month). The company’s engineers can create notes, save them, and playback historical notes whenever they like.

The solution significantly reduced the time needed for report preparation and the waiting time for report readiness. The automated creation of dashboards has also minimised the risk of human errors, (which are unavoidable when creating reports manually).

Key achievements

1. The total effort spent on cutting, pasting and/or sorting data to generate reports for the daily, weekly, and monthly action planning meetings has been measurably reduced.
2. Ability to add and save comments and insights against the reports.
3. The front-end was designed to be user-friendly and developed in line with the most modern data visualisation methods and best practises that allow users to get reliable information in the blink of an eye.
4. The Client’s engineering team can now focus on finding the root cause of losses and solutions to the most urgent problems with the greatest impact on business as well as on planning optimisations.