Lack of visibility into their manufacturing processes is cited as manufacturers' most prevalent issue, according to a survey by Ubisense, a provider of location intelligence solutions. The survey, conducted by SME and Manufacturing Engineering Media, says 40 percent of manufacturers have no visibility into the real-time status of their manufacturing processes.
Companies across all industries depend more and more on analytics and insights to run their businesses profitably. But, attracting, managing and retaining talented personnel to execute on those strategies remains a challenge.
Few decisions have as much power to make or break a product's success and profitability as those around the sourcing of direct materials. The components, parts and assemblies that go into making products not only account for 70 percent of an average manufacturer's annual spend, they have a significant impact on such critical competitive factors as brand reputation, time to market and supply chain reliability.
Retailers generally have a reputation for being slow to embrace the latest innovations in technology. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the retail industry as a whole spends far less on technology than nearly all other service sectors.
The City of Madrid and IBM, through its subsidiary INSA, announced the largest environmental services management project in Spain, designed to improve city life for all of Madrid's 3 million citizens. Using IBM's Smarter Cities technology, this initiative will help improve the delivery and efficiency of city services and provide citizens new tools to interact and communicate with the city council.
Traditional retailers generate and capture a deluge of data - most notably, customer transaction histories that can reveal detailed product affinities and promotional and marketing response rates. Now the emergence of big data and advanced analytical tools and techniques can connect data with a larger context. Big data can explain the who, what, when, where, why, and how of retailing.
While recent innovations in the software sector have significantly boosted capabilities for most software products, free open-source software solutions have made an even bigger splash. More than half of all data mining tasks are now conducted using open-source software, displacing the purchase of proprietary software.
Today, businesses of all stripes are sowing the seeds of Big Data everywhere. And if we think Big Data is big, just think how that data multiplies and branches out when rooted in the multifaceted field of supply chain management.
Most firms have already invested in business intelligence, supply chain management (SCM), and modeling tools that claim to make it possible to drill deeper into their supply chain data in search of savings. These tools are often marketed with vague promises that they will harness the organization's 'big data' and/or provide 'end-to-end' visibility.