Analytics

Drive performance, set goals, measure attainment, identify improvements

Analytics helps to transform your organization into one that is performance driven. Our Analytics solutions link together your processes, people, equipment, and data to provide a common view of your distribution business. Reddwerks WPM solution help you to capitalize on the value of your operational data, enabling your organization to become more agile and competitive by providing operational alignment, visibility, accuracy and greater accountability.

Key Advantages
Sample Dashboard
Architecture

Key analytic advantages

• Improve accuracy: View accuracy by facility, area, technology, workflow, user, and error types for each day, week, month, or any other time span. Identify in real-time what is causing errors and fix it immediately.
• Drive performance compared to goals: Set production goals and see performance against them in real-time. Setting goals for labor that processes multiple product profiles in various areas using different workflows and technology can be a huge challenge. Our solution solves this with goal markers for each activity that provide real-time feedback for each work assignment.
• Discover trends and correlations: Quickly view any of hundreds of metrics for selectors, stockers, QC agents, pallet builders, or the whole facility, and trend performance across any time period in real-time. Trends quickly show correlations and insights that point-in-time reports cannot deliver.
• Executive, manager, and supervisor views: Our analytics engine provides executive, management, and operational views so everyone can easily access the data they need. Users can quickly toggle any view to the level they need to see information to empower quick, real-time decision making.
• Easy and secure access: Access any of hundreds of views from any browser through our 100% web-based user interface. We ensure the right people view the right data by leveraging a customer’s corporate authentication (Active Directory and LDAP) seamlessly during user login. If users do not have permission, data sets are hidden from them when they login.
• OLAP Architecture: Real-time events are written to our OLAP database as equipment, labor, and integration activities complete orders, route containers, perform assignments, replenish inventory, QC, and perform packing and shipping functions. Systems that do not come with a built-in OLAP platform cannot deliver this valuable data in real-time. Our workflow engines can also leverage this data to make automated decisions based on real-time information and trends. Our solution is compliant with other popular reporting tools—like Business Objects, Crystal Reports, Cognos ReportNet, and other OLAP tools—so the data is always accessible to your organization.

Sample Analytic dashboard

• Selecting dashboard: This single view illustrates a tremendous amount of information through a user-friendly, easy-to-read format. View dashboard reports for any day using filters.
• Selection trending: See the selection rate across the day to quickly see production issues. This view also shows product shortages and worker errors across the day and can provide valuable feedback to determine if shorts and errors are related to other activities that occur at specific times.
• Work remaining: See the total amount of work still needed to be planned, picked, reviewed at QC, and loaded in one simple view with estimated completion times for each work area.
• Daily trends: This bar chart shows the day's production rates and totals. Compare the totals to yesterday's rate, a 7-day or 30-day average, or the same day last week.
• Error lines: View a summary of workers with line errors recorded today and mark them for additional auditing through the Reddwerks order processing system.

Analytics architecture

The Reddwerks WPM solution includes an integrated data mart and data transformation engine that works behind the scenes to move, scrub, format, and aggregate the events, orders, and labor activities in real-time into our analytic cubes (OLAP). Our data mart is based on OLAP technologies that scale well in real-time environments with large data sets, allowing users to slice and dice data while providing the ability to trend large amounts of data over large periods.

To read more about the advantages of OLAP, go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLAP

To read more about BI 1.0, go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence

To read more about BI 2.0, go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Intelligence_2.0

• Process work and capture data: Our analytic data collectors gather real-time events from integration points, equipment, labor workflows, and users. As each event occurs, it is stored with additional attributes like technology, equipment type, location, slot speed, product speed, user, area, area size, and goal rate to ensure we capture the full context of each event. Our data collectors are step one in our process and ensure everything you could want on a report is written into our analytic framework and available for reports and dashboards.
• Backup: Our analytic framework includes a real-time backup mechanism that ensures your daily data and entire historical data sets are always secure. If any issues occur on a single server or process your entire order processing system (PTL, RF, voice, conveyor) and analytics engines can be restarted on failover servers in just five minutes. Once restarted, every event, line item, container, and order is in a known state to the second that the failover occurred; no data or productivity is lost.
• Publish: Our analytics publisher moves data from our OLTP database model into our OLAP data mart to improve reporting performance and provide massive amounts of available information per record. Our patent pending data publisher performs data moves through our real-time SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) analytic services to ensure information is available and up to date.
• Optimize: Data is optimized as it is pushed into the data to allow all users to securely access data at any level of aggregation from any web browser. Executives can view total production rates trended for the past month, managers can trend throughput for the first five hours of the day and compare that to the prior day. Operations can view the top five users creating errors in the past hour to provide corrective action. Metric reports, views, and dashboards can all be run against real-time information with no impact to the equipment, workflows, and labor performance.
• Analyze results: The first four steps in our analytics framework guarantee that all users from executives to operations supervisors can now analyze large amounts of data quickly for selectors, stockers, QC agents, pallet builders, equipment, and technology. The freedom to analyze any data in real-time provides users with the ability to quickly identify labor bottlenecks, exceptions, accuracy and quality issues. Strategies to quickly improve performance, material flow, labor rates, and accuracy within your warehouse can be identified, implemented, and measured.