Manufacturing analytics

Artigo
11/27/2024

Businesses capture lots of data during daily activities that supports business intelligence (BI) for manufacturing, such as:

Utilization
Capacity
Work center load
Production time
Production scrap

Business Central provides features to help you gather, analyze, and share your organization's manufacturing data:

Power BI reports for manufacturing
Ad-hoc analysis on lists
Ad-hoc analysis of data in Excel (using Open in Excel)
Built-in manufacturing analytics tools
Built-in manufacturing reports

Each feature has its advantages and disadvantages, depending on the type of analysis you want to do and your role. To learn more, go to Analytics, business intelligence, and reporting overview.

This article introduces how you can use these analytical features to gain insights into your manufacturing processes.

Analytics needs in manufacturing

When you think about analytics in manufacturing, it might help to use a persona-based model that describes different needs at a high-level.

People in different roles have different needs when it comes to data, and they use data in different ways. For example, people in manufacturing interact with data differently than people in finance.

Role	Data aggregation	Typical ways to consume data
COO / CFO / CEO	Performance data	KPIs, dashboards, financial reports
Plant Manager	Trends, summaries	Built-in managerial reports, ad-hoc analysis
Factory worker	Detailed data	Built-in operational reports, on-screen task data

Using Power BI to monitor key performance indicators in manufacturing

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that shows how effectively you’re meeting your goals. Businesses often use the following KPIs to monitor production performance:

Capacity used (hours), either current or historical
Utilization percentage, either current or historical
Work center load percentage, allocated time (hours), or available capacity (hours)
Cost amount variance or deviation percentage

These KPIs (and more) are available for manufacturing in the Power BI Manufacturing app for Business Central.

To learn more, go to Manufacturing KPIs

Reports in the Power BI Manufacturing app

The following table describes how you can use the reports in the Power BI Manufacturing app.

To...	Open in Business Central (CTRL+select)	Learn more
Analyze the current use of work centers and optimize production processes.	Current Utilization	About Current Utilization
Analyze historical use of work centers and identify trends and patterns and plan for future capacity needs.	Historical Utilization	About Historical Utilization
Gain insights into work center load and capacity and find bottlenecks and balance production across work centers.	Work Center Load	About Work Center Load
Track allocated hours for each work center to understand workloads.	Allocated Hours	About Allocated Hours
Monitor expected capacity based on production orders to plan for future capacity needs.	Expected Capacity Need	About Expected Capacity Need
Analyze finished production orders by item and work centers and gain insights into important metrics of production orders.	Finished Production Order Breakdown	About Finished Production Order Breakdown
Track consumption variance for each item and production order and improve production efficiency.	Consumption Variance	About Consumption Variance
Analyze capacity variance for each work center and production order and identify capacity constraints.	Capacity Variance	About Capacity Variance
Monitor average production times for each item and work center to improve your production planning.	Average Production Times	About Average Production Times
Analyze released production orders by item, work center, and time period so you ensure they complete on time.	Released Production Orders	About Released Production Orders
Track production scrap by item, work center, and time period to identify production waste and reduce costs.	Production Scrap	About Production Scrap

Tip

You can easily track the KPIs that the Power BI reports display against your business objectives. To learn more, go to Track your business KPIs with Power BI metrics.

To learn more, go to Power BI Manufacturing app.

Ad-hoc analysis of manufacturing data

Sometimes you just need to check whether the numbers add up correctly, or quickly confirm a figure. The following features are great for ad-hoc analyses:

Data analysis on ledger list pages
Open in Excel

The Data Analysis feature lets you open almost any list page, such as Item Ledger Entries or Capacity Ledger Entries, enter analysis mode, and then group, filter, and pivot data as you see fit.

Similarly, you can use the Open in Excel action to open a list page, optionally filter the list to a subset of the data, and then use Excel to work with the data. For example, by using features such as Analyze Data, What-If Analysis, or Forecast Sheet.

Tip

If you configure OneDrive for system features, the Excel workbook opens in your browser.

Built-in reports for manufacturing

Business Central includes several built-in reports to help manufacturing organizations report on their data.

To get an overview of available reports, choose All reports at the top of your Home page. This action opens the Role Explorer page, which is filtered to the features in the Report & Analysis option. To find reports related to manufacturing, in the Find field, enter manufacturing. To learn more, go to Finding Reports with the Role Explorer.

To learn more about reports that are relevant for manufacturing, go to Built-in production report overview.

On-screen manufacturing analytics

Business Central has several pages that give you manufacturing overviews and tasks to do, such as:

View the load in work and machine centers

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