Background:

A top 5 auto manufacturer was looking to obtain a single view into the company’s Key Performance Indicators “KPI” of their Canadian operations. The issue was that as the company had grown, so had its department specific siloed systems. Even though the company had an Enterprise Resource Planning software, individual departments were using function specific tools outside of the ERP.

Consolidated reporting on KPI was ad hoc, and entirely a manual process. Besides being excessively time consuming any preparation would require resources that were otherwise intended to be used elsewhere. AAARL was selected from an RFP out of 20 other competition to be the implementation partner. The overall project goals is to give management and the company a start into data analytics and data science.

Challenge:

To consolidate data from a multitude of systems into a single at a glance dashboard, in real time with a single “version of the truth” for the executives.

The Approach

Advanced Analytics and Research Lab was selected to develop and test a prototype, then fully design and build the live production system. Based on the positive early results, AAARL was requested to automate data feeds from 5 distinct business platforms that do not communicate with each other.

Key areas included a list of specific measures for: safety, product quality, and HR.

The feed from the systems was directed into a virtual server kept on premise for data security. AAARL consolidated and analyzed the data and present it via the client’s Microsoft Power BI interface.

What made AAARL stand out was not just the ability to extract, consolidate and synthesize data, but to make it happen in a dramatically compressed schedule. The original six month schedule was shrunk down to two months of total time to implementation.

Results

A single Dashboard with real time clarity into the KPI that matter to the executive team. A business intelligence and data science road map for the senior executives. Our team also generated various large scale optimization ideas for the client.

While this project may seem like a IT related accomplishment, the client recognized the accomplishment by inviting AAARL as the only external party to speak at the company’s annual innovation conference in 2020 on the topics of data science for manufacturing.