Industrial 4.0-Reports Application & development
On the early stage of collecting operation report for management analysis, 97% of the reports were created by Excel manually. After having the ERP system, slowly we are able to generate reports from one or two dimensions point of view. But when the time goes by, the management wish to have more detailed analysis due to industry characteristic, resulting the reports are much more customize and complicate. In the end, the basic reports from ERP are not able to fulfill customer requirement. Firstly, we will look at the pros and cons of each types of reports
Table 1: Advantages and disadvantages of reporting tools
| Tools | DATABASE | MODIFICATION | ACCURACY | DIMENSION | FORMAT | IMMEDIACY | Visual & Presentation |
| EXCEL | Human Manually | Easy | Unconfirmed | 1 to 2 dimensions | LIMITED | NO | NO |
| ERP Report | ERP DATABASE | Difficult | High | 1 to 2 dimensions | LIMITED | YES | NO |
| BI | ERP DATABASE | Difficult | High | Multi dimensions | CUSTOMIZABLE | YES | YES |
Everyone knows if large amounts of manual processing are very error-prone and cannot be obtained in time. ERP reports can be obtained immediately, but these ERP reports are mainly data table information in ERP or 1 to 3 dimensions statistics table, unable to show all details or customized information in one interface, need to combine various reports. And BI is a smart report that extends from the ERP report. It’s no longer limited to the statistical table format only, but the multi-format with visualized data, so that the management can see every information at a glance.
EXCEL: In the early most commonly used method of generating reports, its contents
were easy to be manipulated and amended by the people.
ERP: Due to the early EXCEL is prone to fraud, and the data is difficult to verify, the company began to use ERP, allowing departments to monitor each other to reduce the drawbacks, but the reports are limited and gradually unable to meet the needs of management.
BI: Due to the development of technology and fierce competition in business, the
company needs more complete and more instant data for management to make important decisions.
In short, decision-makers could change to using BI technology to obtain reports:
- Drill through the multi-dimensional analysis of the dashboard: Dashboard allows decision makers to drill into multidimensional analysis models, and to see which KPI indicators have problems and the cause of the problem from a multi-angle analysis of the true source of the problem.
- The BI system can realize the “pull” and “push” information providing methods. The decision makers can log in to the BI system at any time to query, or the system will push key information by email or SMS. As you can see here, BI is a system, it is three-dimensional, and the report is just a way of presentation.
Competition between peers is often cruel, and it may be squeezed by the other party if enterprises are not careful. This is one of the reasons why many companies are struggling. Nowadays, data visualization can represent the company analyzes data in a relatively short period of time, making business and product decisions quickly, improving products, and driving business growth, therefore making them more suitable for market growth.
Whether it’s collecting data, analyzing data or making decisions, it’s very important for most companies. However, only data analysis is useless, because data analysis can’t fully display the charm of the data, so only visualization of the data can be truly achieved.
