How can BI prevent downtimes?

In the industrial sector, companies are often reactive when downtimes occur. This means that they address machine breakdowns and anomalies in the parts produced once the problem has occurred. What if analyzing your data allowed you to act before a breakdown occurs? That's why business intelligence is critical for preventative maintenance.

What is BI (business intelligence)?

Business intelligence is data management that uses technologies, processes, and tools to collect, analyze, and present useful information to a company's decision-makers. BI aims to provide actionable data to help businesses make informed decisions and improve overall performance. By using BI tools, such as dashboards, predictive analytics and automated alerts, companies can detect potential problems before they become full-blown (and costly!) downtimes.

BI enables data extraction from multiple and often disparate sources, including ERP systems, operational databases, business applications and Excel files.

Which tool to use?

Power BI is a data analysis platform from Microsoft that offers a wide range of features to help users uncover the insightsbehind their data, create interactive dashboards, and visualize information in real time.

How does BI actually work?

BI can help prevent production downtimes by providing real-time information about business performance, market trends, unforeseen events and other factors affecting production. Power BI can combine data from multiple sources and interrelate them into a single dashboard.

For example, real-time production data can be monitored to identify bottlenecks and unexpected glitches in a process. Predictive analytics can help identify trends that could impact production over the long term, such as equipment failures or quality issues. Based on statistics, like average time per production step, machine downtime and employee productivity, trends can be monitored so that people can take action if deviations arise. Automated alerts can be set up to notify production managers when a potential problem is detected.

By using Power BI, companies can take proactive steps to address problems before any downtimes happen. This can include planning preventive maintenance for equipment, improving production processes to reduce downtimes, and adjusting production levels based on market demand.

Using business intelligence can help companies be more agile and react quickly, thanks to dashboards presenting condensed and real-time analytics.