The Study on the Application of Business Intelligence in Manufacturing: A Review

Manufacturing Processes And Problems

A manufacturing organization consists of many processes initiating from customer orders until the delivery of products to customers (Wiendahl, 2007). The process flow in a manufacturing company is as shown in Figure 1. Being the general flow of the manufacturing organization, it might vary from one organization to another.

Figure 1.

Manufacturing process flow

The problem seen in the operation section is that, whether the products have been completely built by the production folks or not, they are unknown (Minguez, 2011). The whole process stays invisible to others as there is no real-time information, unless we go down to the production floor itself and check the status ourselves. The problem seen in the Operation Section or also called the shop floor and production here is, the urgent customer orders are often overlooked. In other words, the priority of the orders in accordance to its delivery schedule is not being monitored and carried out. Employees tend to pick a simple order and item (that does not have so many materials to build for example) to fulfil. In addition, if ever exists an order which requires further attention, even though remarks are put in the list, this order is often neglected. Rarely will it be reviewed back by the production employees after the remarks have been updated. This results in the delay of delivery of that item, eventually affects the on time delivery performance of the organization. Moreover, in the program management side of the organization, a frequent follow up with the operational staffs has to be made to push them to fulfil the top priority orders.