Client Confidentiality Note: Litza Tech maintains strict client confidentiality. The specifics of this manufacturing engagement are anonymized while highlighting the core challenges and outcomes.
An established manufacturing company, operating several production facilities, was hampered by fragmented data. Critical information related to production output (from SCADA systems and MES), quality control checks (often logged manually or in separate databases), inventory levels (from ERP systems), and machine maintenance logs resided in disparate, unconnected systems. This made it incredibly difficult for plant managers and corporate leadership to get a timely, accurate, holistic view of operations. Identifying the root causes of production slowdowns or quality defects was a slow, manual, and often inaccurate process, hindering efforts to improve efficiency and reduce waste.
Litza Tech’s Data Solutions and Data Analytics & BI teams were brought in to create a single source of truth and unlock actionable insights. Our structured approach involved:
- Data Source Audit & Strategy: We conducted a comprehensive audit of all relevant data sources across the different facilities, mapping data points, assessing quality, and defining a strategy for data integration.
- Centralized Data Warehouse Implementation: We designed and built a cloud-based data warehouse (e.g., using Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift) optimized for analytical workloads. This provided a scalable and performant central repository for all operational data.
- ETL/ELT Pipeline Development: We developed robust Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) or Extract, Load, Transform (ELT) pipelines to automatically ingest data from the various source systems (databases, file shares, APIs) into the data warehouse, ensuring data cleansing, standardization, and consistency.
- Data Modeling: We structured the data within the warehouse using dimensional modeling techniques to facilitate efficient querying and analysis for key business dimensions like time, product, production line, facility, and quality metrics.
- Interactive BI Dashboard Creation: Using a leading BI tool (e.g., Tableau or Power BI), we built a suite of interactive dashboards tailored to different user groups (plant managers, quality assurance teams, executive leadership). These dashboards visualized critical KPIs, including:
- Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) by line, shift, and facility.
- Real-time production output vs. targets.
- Defect rates and Pareto analysis of defect types.
- Inventory turnover rates and stock level alerts.
- Machine downtime analysis and correlation with maintenance schedules.
The impact was immediate and significant. For the first time, management had real-time, unified visibility into cross-facility operations through user-friendly dashboards. Plant managers could quickly drill down into performance issues, identifying bottlenecks or quality deviations within minutes rather than days. For example, one dashboard revealed a correlation between a specific raw material batch and increased defect rates on a particular line, enabling rapid corrective action. Within the first year, the client reported a 10% improvement in average OEE across key lines and a measurable reduction in scrap and rework costs, directly attributed to the insights gained from the new analytics platform. Litza Tech transformed their fragmented data into a powerful asset for driving operational excellence.
