This issue marks the fourth installment of the PK Data BI project, where we will showcase our solutions through management challenges, application objectives, deployment architecture, and key application scenarios. At PK Data, we are committed to providing a one-stop enterprise-level BI visualization analysis platform for businesses, demonstrating our product and service capabilities.
Company Profile
Zhengda Pipe Manufacturing is one of the top ten key supported enterprises in Handan City, a top 100 enterprise in Hebei Province, among the top 500 manufacturing enterprises in China, the top 500 private enterprises in China, a national-level high-tech enterprise, and a national contract-keeping and credit-worthy enterprise. It is a modern comprehensive company that specializes in the manufacturing and sales of high-frequency welded pipes, hot-dipped galvanized pipes, spiral-welded pipes, square and rectangular steel pipes, and steel-plastic composite pipes, integrating science, industry, trade, and culture.
"Tiān Hóng" and "Jìlì" steel pipes are extensively used in key infrastructure projects across numerous countries and provinces, including the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, Shanghai World Expo, Hangzhou Bay Bridge, Henan Intercity Railway Yellow River Bridge, Wuhan Yangtze River Tunnel, Three Gorges Dam, Jinan Olympic Sports Center, Nanjing Metro Line 3, Shangxiu High-Speed Railway, Kunming Changshui International Airport, Vanke Real Estate, Wanda Plaza, Jinci 30 million tons coal-to-oil project, Shandong Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project, and Guizhou Province's rural safe drinking water project.
The company has become the designated supplier for numerous national large enterprises, including China Construction, China Railway, China Metallurgical Group, Sinopec, CNPC, and CNOOC. Our domestic sales network extends as far as Xinjiang, Qinghai, Yunnan-Guizhou, and is遍布 across the nation. Currently, "Tianhong" brand steel pipes have been exported to countries such as Germany, France, Portugal, the United States, Canada, Peru, Uruguay, Colombia, Libya, Brazil, India, the Philippines, and Malaysia.
Management Challenges
How to integrate and analyze data scattered across multiple systems to maximize its value?
After several years of operation, the business system has accumulated a vast amount of information. However, when managers require decision-making data, the system fails to directly provide relevant support information, leading to a situation where senior management frequently needs reports from business departments, which are mostly submitted manually. How to tap into the potential value of data, reduce unnecessary manual report compilation tasks, and offer effective decision-making support through data analysis systems has become a top priority.
Despite the business system providing numerous reports, managers still require more and often find that the reports offered by the system do not meet their needs. After all, the market is unpredictable, and analysis focus points at different times must vary, necessitating different reports. How to satisfy the frequent changes in reporting requirements.
Currently, our company's ERP system offers basic report functionalities, but lacks professional reporting tools. Management at all levels of the enterprise cannot, and is unable, to manage and control the company through the ERP or business management software systems. They are unable to obtain key business information in a timely, accurate, and complete manner, nor can they analyze and research this information, thereby optimizing and controlling the company.
It is challenging to accurately comprehend the fluctuations and their impact levels of various business data, such as how the overall costs and profits of the company change when a single factor varies.
Many factors influence profit or cost changes, making it impossible to identify which are the key drivers, thus preventing the adoption of effective measures to expand and create profits.
A substantial amount of business data has accumulated within our operational system, yet these data remain largely dormant beyond basic querying and tracking. It's challenging to effectively utilize, analyze, and report on this data, making it difficult for management to gain the necessary decision-making information.
The current business system is an online transaction processing system, rather than an online analytical processing system. It focuses on process management, with business processes operating according to established patterns, but lacks the ability to determine how to optimize for better efficiency.
Lack of timely, effective, and convenient monitoring, comparison, analysis, early warning, and forecasting of the company's sales and operational data, as well as the monitoring of key business information, and the integration of existing business system software data to provide accurate, timely, and effective data knowledge for corporate leadership decision-making.
Information Technology Application Goals
Unified Platform, Centralized Management
The big data project is being implemented in a phased approach, focusing on strengthening foundations and enhancing management. It aims to establish a unified, cross-regional big data analysis platform to achieve centralized management, analysis, and data sharing of the company's data.
Enhance Internal Controls, Elevate Efficiency
Further strengthen internal management, enhance work efficiency, fully leverage the overall strengths of each company, promote the integration and coordinated development of internal and external resources, and achieve a comprehensive improvement in the company's operational management level, thereby increasing the management benefits of the company.
Intelligent Analysis, Supporting Decision-Making
Integrating business data, conducting thematic analysis on the data; visualizing business data through a big data platform, graphically displaying various operational indicators to support senior management decision-making; optimizing data query levels, simplifying the complexity of data queries; tracing data sources to deeply analyze the composition of indicators and the reasons for abnormal fluctuations; comparing actual occurrences with plans to monitor and issue early warnings on the company's operational performance.
Precise Production Scheduling
By leveraging marketing data analysis systems, automatically acquiring historical sales data and customer inventory search data, we optimize inventory design for greater precision and reasonability, arrange production schedules more scientifically, accelerate inventory turnover, and maximize customer satisfaction.
Precise Pricing
Utilizing the marketing data analysis system, based on historical transaction data, we establish customer profiles, loyalty metrics, and value tags to achieve precise pricing, enhance market share, and maximize product profitability.
Summary: CP Steel needs to establish a unified BI visualization platform with a heterogeneous group of multiple data sources and systems to achieve precise marketing and production scheduling for the company.
Application Deployment Architecture
Business System
The company has been successfully utilizing the u8 Supply Chain Management System, Financial General Ledger System, and other business systems for many years within our ERP system.
Big Data Analysis Theme: Through repeated research and confirmation of the company group's needs, we have identified the core analysis themes centered around business processes such as sales, procurement, inventory, marketing, and salesperson management, and categorized them into supply themes, sales themes, executive themes, and management dashboards based on management positions.
Key Application Scenarios
Analysis Indicator System
We have developed a comprehensive, multi-factory collaborative business intelligence (BI) visualization analysis platform that encompasses sales, procurement, inventory, production scheduling, and market customer analysis. Specifically, the platform includes analyses on sales and market, procurement, inventory, production scheduling, and operational management themes. It features 86 cumulative analysis models, over 340 analytical metrics, over 60 PC web pages, and over 40 mobile web pages, achieving the goals of precise production scheduling and sales targeting.
Procurement Topic
By integrating purchasing price data across multiple factories, we analyze the purchasing price situation from various dimensions such as public factories, departments, products, and months. This allows for direct comparison and analysis of the price and proportion of the same product across multiple factories, effectively understanding the role of purchasing prices in the cost. It enables timely and effective measures to reduce purchasing prices.
Business Analysis Theme
Applicability Value
The operations center manages sales, procurement, and inventory, overseeing all business operations from a comprehensive perspective of the company's overall management.
By monitoring procurement prices and on-time delivery rates, we maintain control over raw material arrivals and precisely manage costs.
By comparing production and sales volumes across different cycles, we promptly adjust production schedules, optimize inventory, and enhance capital and product turnover rates.
Through comprehensive analysis of average selling prices and tube differences from various angles, we precisely adjust market prices to maintain product competitiveness.
A clear comparison of inventory age, obsolescence, and stockpiling situations, along with early warning analysis, can effectively prompt personnel at all levels to quickly address the issues.
Inventory analysis of various product types and turnover rates provides precise data for purchasing plans, production scheduling, and sales shipment.
Manufacturing Industry BI Analysis