Integrated Reporting in Manufacturing: Exploring Benefits, Challenges, and Emerging Trends
Manufacturing operations are getting increasingly complex, spanning several locations and geographies. Yet, only some achieve success when it comes to having a comprehensive view of business. With data lying in siloed pockets, only a small group of people can access or know the available data resources. If you want to achieve end-to-end visibility into your manufacturing business, you need to bridge these silos and ensure your production floor data is not distinct from your sales-related data and vice versa.
Read on to learn how integrated reporting can overcome the problem of data fragmentation and help decision-makers see the big picture of how their actions and decisions affect the company.
What Is Integrated Reporting?
Integrated reporting is a complete report of components involved in creating value in the short, medium, and long term. Integrated reporting considers the needs of all stakeholders. It is a holistic concept that bridges the siloed reporting mindset, which is otherwise focused on one team or department.
Instead, integrated reporting focuses on the entire business model, keeping the overall business strategy in focus. As such, integrated reporting delivers much-needed insight into an organization’s strategy, risks and opportunities, and ability to create value. Elaborating on the organization’s market position and business model throws light into various business processes/activities and the resulting outputs or impact on capital.
What Benefits Does It Offer to The Manufacturing Sector?
In the manufacturing sector, integrated reporting delivers several benefits to various teams:
Sales
Integrated reporting empowers sales teams with rich dashboards and reports, giving them the power to visualize sales and performance data in real-time. Insights into various sales metrics can enable teams to get deep insight into product and agent performance and take steps to boost customer satisfaction.
Teams can also dive into details such as sales closed in a day/week, planned sales vs. actual sales, orders to inventory availability, etc.
Finance
For finance teams, integrated reporting allows for seamless and accurate insight into the company’s financial position. Such insight allows teams to ensure compliance with necessary regulatory authorities while getting a true and updated picture of the company’s financial health.
It also helps key decision-makers form predictive opinions about future performance and take the right steps to adjust manufacturing operations.
Inventory
For inventory teams, integrated reporting offers deep insights and KPIs and an analysis of the entire product journey — from raw materials entering the manufacturing environment to finished goods reaching the end customer. Integrated reporting leverages data from one centralized location and simplifies extraction by centralizing data from various teams and processes. This data can then be used to make intelligent inventory decisions, minimizing the chances of inventory shortage and stockpiling.
Production
Integrated reporting enables production teams to monitor and assess the manufacturing pipeline effectively and constructively. It can allow shopfloor managers to conduct timely and accurate root cause analyses across various use cases — from nonfulfillment of orders to loss of raw materials, slow inventory turnover, and more. Providing detailed insight into what went wrong enables production managers to make informed decisions that improve the manufacturing process.
What Are the Challenges in Implementation?
Enabling integrated reporting, no matter how important brings with it several challenges. Let’s look at the top three roadblocks to successfully adopting integrated reporting:
Data Silos
Regarding enabling integrated reporting, manufacturers’ most significant challenge is creating a single source of truth. Data silos expanding across production floors, warehouses, distribution centres, and global supply chains prevent operational processes from reaching peak productivity. These silos also restrict business leaders from getting a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the business and making informed decisions.
Skills Gap
Manufacturing businesses deal with complex and difficult-to-comprehend data — from overall equipment effectiveness to process control, operational maturity to sensor data, inventory levels to demand data, order management to procurement, and more. Most manufacturing organizations lack the expertise to process and analyze this data and generate insights for better business outcomes.
Leadership Support
The lack of leadership support is another roadblock that restricts manufacturing businesses from enabling integrated reporting. Convincing the board that benefits are more significant than costs is a Herculean task and often impacts integrated reporting from being incorporated as part of existing reporting requirements. At the same time, many manufacturers need to assign a regulatory body that will establish and enforce IR standards and the potential extension of directors’ liability.
What Role Can an Expert Partner Play?
Informed decisions are made when complex data is accurately and visually represented via intuitive reports and dashboards. An expert partner can enable a meaningful display of manufacturing data while focusing on the business objective’s clarity, coherence, timeliness, and relativity.
Skilled partners like Ellicium can help your manufacturing business consolidate and visualize your data using the latest technologies and business in-practice processes. Our Business Intelligence and Data Visualization (BI/DV) professionals can:
- Create an analytics data mart to enable a single source of truth across sales, finance, production, and inventory and help you stay ahead of your competition.
- Convert your data into instantaneous business decisions with the help of visualizations and dashboards.
- Offer an integrated view of data from multiple sources, helping you capture meaningful data for analysis and increased engagement.
Achieve Integrated Reporting Success with Ellicium
It is now widely accepted that traditional reporting approaches still need to meet businesses’ needs. To develop and maintain resilient and responsible manufacturing operations, you must focus heavily on bridging data silos. Embarking on the integrated reporting journey can allow for greater clarity on business issues and performance. Through seamless data visualization, it can help you better understand your manufacturing operations, so you can boost engagement, strengthen stakeholder relationships, and improve your gross margins.
Explore our reporting and dashboarding capabilities today.