Jun 4 2014
Business Intelligence and Jidoka | Toyota’s Simon Dorrat | PEX
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Simon Dorrat is Manager of Toyota’s Business Intelligence function where he is responsible for defining and delivering all services relating to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing including BI, ETL, Data Quality, Master Data and OLAP. […] Simon shares his thoughts on how Business Intelligence fits with the Toyota Way, suggests three ways for IT to provide better value to the business and even explains why doing a kitchen renovation helped some illuminate important aspects of software development.
For the IT-phobic, a Data Warehouse is a database that makes historical data from multiple sources accessible for analytics. It is commonly used to provide management with Business Intelligence (BI). The process of periodically feeding a data warehouse is called Extract, Transfer and Load (ETL).
Of course, analysis is only worth doing on data that is complete and accurate, hence the need for tools to ensure Data Quality. The different sources usually have different nomenclatures for products, processes, or facilities, and you need your Master Data to integrate them in a single, consistent model. Finally, “OLAP” stands for Online Analytical Processing.
The first sentence in the article describes Toyota as “creating the precursor to Lean Manufacturing” and nearly made me stop reading further. It would have been a mistake.
See on www.processexcellencenetwork.com
Aug 2 2016
Excel Hell – An Insider’s Report | Chad Smith | LinkedIn Pulse
“95% of companies report that they are using spreadsheets to augment their ERP system for planning. I asked a good friend that I have known for 20 years to share his experiences with the proliferation of work-arounds and ad-hoc planning “solutions” that we tend to see in most companies that run MRP. My friend cannot specifically name the products his company makes because the market is dominated globally by only two players (he works for one of them). The sales of this company are between $100M – $500M (US) annually. Read about his experiences and let me know if you can relate.”
Sourced through LinkedIn Pulse
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
The issues listed by Chad Smith’s friend are not specific to Excel. His company’s MRP or ERP system does not meet the functional needs of the Planning Department, and its members supplement it by crunching data extracts from it on their personal systems, in their own ways. The manager does not control what formulas are used, and does not know how diligent each member is at keeping the data up do date. The planners happen to be using Excel, but these problems would not be solved if they replaced Excel with any other single-user tool: they should all work on the same data, not individually ordered extracts of inconsistent vintage, and the planning logic should be shared, not buried in private spreadsheets.
Continue reading…
Share this:
Like this:
By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: Data Warehouse, ERP, In-Memory Database, Job rotation, Middleware