As operations evolve they move beyond basic accounting systems into workflow systems that provide visibility on specific areas of the operation. For example, an accounting system will track inventory by SKU and cost. But to know the location and state of every product in your warehouse, you would need a Warehouse Management System.
Workflow data is an extension of ERP software that provides far more detail about the specific part of their business they use the workflow system for. Some examples are:
WMS – Warehouse Management Software: Time series data that tells you the location and status of each item as it flows through your distribution center.
MRP – Material Resource Planning: Time series data that tells you the state of each product as it flows through your manufacturing facility.
TMS – Transportation Management System: Time series data that provides the details about the trucking and delivery of your products.
CRM – Customer Relationship Management: Time series data that details the activities associated with a customer or potential customer.
Companies are just beginning to discover ways to use workflow data to better understand their operations.
Business Intelligence (BI) software has become very popular in the last several years. BI Tools are great at visualizing data, but on its own visualization isn’t enough. The bigger challenge is knowing what you want to visualize and how to extract and transform your data to be used by these BI Tools.
In this blog series, we will discuss use cases and examples on how to use data from your workflow systems strategically:
Staffing Allocation Analysis – a study of FTE vs temporary employee allocation comparing true cost and productivity levels.
Technology ROI – a cost and productivity study comparing different technologies across a multi-facility operation.
Process Health – leveraging labor management data into deeper insights about process health and efficiency.
Network Comparative Analysis – a financial opportunity analysis comparing process performance and cost across a network of operations.
Tools for Success – a study on data transformation and tooling configuration to create the various analytics.
Stay tuned – as we release each new blog in the series, we will link to them here.
