As a manufacturing company leader, you ask yourself many daily questions about improving your organization. How can we reduce costs? How can we increase the quality of our products? How can we know our customers better? These questions can be difficult to answer if you’re not well-informed. That’s why businesses like yours have turned to the experts at phData to answer questions like these through data-driven facts and insights.
In this blog, we’ll discuss some of the top questions you and other manufacturers may ask yourself that can be answered by phData through data.
Manufacturing Questions phData Can Answer with Data
How Can We Optimize our Supply Chain?
Supply chain management can lead to some of the biggest headaches within the manufacturing industry. Not having enough stock, having too much stock, and overpaying for shipping are just a few of the issues that come up all the time. So, how can phData use data to optimize the supply chain so we get the parts you need on time and cost-efficiently?
Improve Demand Forecasting
Collect and analyze historical sales data and external data such as weather patterns, general economic indicators, and competitor data to gain a more holistic view of demand.
Enhance Supplier Management
Track delivery times, quality control, pricing from different suppliers, and external factors such as raw materials disruptions or geopolitical disruptions.
Inventory Optimization
All these data points can then be used to optimize the inventory of parts needed to create new products and the inventory levels of the products themselves.
Once the data is collected and analyzed, it can be used to create a supply chain dashboard. Decision-makers can then see how the supply chain is running and make changes as needed.
Here is an example supply chain dashboard created by phData:
How Can We Track Consumer Trends Earlier?
What consumers want seems to change daily. It can be hard for manufacturers to pivot to another product when demand increases suddenly. Wouldn’t it be great to know if consumer demand would shift soon? Luckily, social media can be a goldmine for understanding consumer trends and preferences. phData can use social media data to:
Collect brand mentions, hashtags, or industry keywords
It helps identify consumer sentiment toward your products and those of competitors
Determine which products customers are excited about or frustrated with to determine underlying trends as they happen
Identify influencers connected to your brand
Collect and analyze influencer’s social media to stay updated on emerging or diminishing trends
High engagement metrics (likes, shares, etc) on influencers’ posts about topics related to your brand can also indicate consumer interest.
Combined with traditional polls and surveys, this data can create a dashboard of consumer feelings about your products and those related to them, allowing you to anticipate new trends.
How Can We Detect Defects In Our Products Easier?
Detecting product defects can be time-consuming, costly (both for paying people to catch them and if you don’t catch them soon enough), and tedious. Large manufacturers are starting to use computer vision artificial intelligence (AI) to detect defects cheaper and more efficiently than using human eyes. AI can be trained to determine even the most subtle defects in products while being available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However, creating a computer vision AI requires data scientists to train models for months before they can give results, right? PhData has recently partnered with LandingAI, a leader in vision AI, who has developed an application called LandingLens that can put visual AI use cases in production faster and more efficiently than ever before.
By using this new application, phData can:
Help you set up defect detection in a manner of weeks instead of months
Create image data pipelines to feed training data to the software as required
Train your people how to use the software with little to no machine learning experience required
Adding computer vision can vastly improve defect detection in your production, saving manpower costs and increasing the quality of your product.
Why phData?
Many data engineering consulting companies could also answer these questions for you, or maybe you think you have the talent on your team to do it in-house. Why should you choose phData to help?
Expertise
Here at phData, we strive to be experts in data engineering, analytics, and machine learning. Our engineers have worked with many businesses like yours and can use that knowledge to answer questions with data that you may have never thought possible on your own. We continuously learn and grow as a team to adapt to the ever-changing data landscape and ensure we’re up to date on all the latest technologies.
Partners
We are partnered with dozens of companies that create data and machine learning engineering tools and have advanced knowledge of them. This allows us to recommend the best tooling for the job, which can make DE and MLE faster, more efficient, and cost-effective for you and your team.
Automation
With all our experience with projects, we have created in-house automation tools for many DE tasks, especially when using Snowflake as your cloud data provider. These include (but are not limited to):
SQL dialect translation
Data migration validation
Synthetic data generation
Information Architecture provisioning
These automation tools are free for all phData customers in perpetuity.
Case Study
phData has helped many manufacturers answer tough questions by utilizing their data. Here is just one example of what we’ve done for other organizations just like yours:
The Problem
How Can We Automatically Track Consumer Trends to Make More Informed Decisions About Our Products?
A startup food manufacturer was utilizing social media data to track trends and find niche markets for developing new products. The marketing team spent weeks analyzing spreadsheets of TikTok and Twitter data.
The Solution
phData built an end-to-end trend-scoring methodology using Natural Language Processing and forecasting techniques with Dataiku that involved human-in-the-loop feedback and reduced analysis time from weeks to 2 hours.
The Results
The manufacturer quickly released two new product lines to capitalize on growing food trends. The company referred to the product as the “backbone of their business” six months after phData rolled off the engagement.
Closing
All the data your company collects on its daily processes can be used in many ways to determine how your company is doing and where it could go. But without data experts like the ones at phData, you could miss out on valuable information. With the rise of AI, it’s even more important to have your data in a modern data stack, ready to be used to help save money and stay ahead of the competition.
To make the most of your data and gain useful insights, partnering with phData gives you the know-how to handle data and AI. Reach out to phData today for more help and turn your data into a key asset.
