Decision Intelligence: How it can help Manufacturers accelerate their Data to Decisions journey

Data doesn’t change the organization. Decisions do. Every decision drives value - from big strategic choices to thousands of operational micro-moments. In today's increasing VUCA world, advanced analytics and data science underpin the most critical decisions taken by business stakeholders to gain a distinct competitive advantage. Over the last decade or so, business intelligence (BI) tools have successfully proliferated, deep within and across organizations - big and small. These tools, armed with advanced search and augmented BI technologies, have revolutionized the way organizations access, interact, and consume data to churn out actionable insights. Despite their phenomenal efforts in humanizing data analytics, they fall short of democratizing it for business users, who still have to rely on business analysts and data scientists to generate insights, thereby delaying decision making. Also, such technologies are great as long as you know exactly what you are looking for but are constrained in uncovering hidden insights, solving complex business scenarios, or applying advanced analytical models. Clearly, there is a need for a technology that fills this void and further reduces the time to insights and decisions.

Decision Intelligence: Democratizing insights for the decision-makers

We are at the cusp of a new era of intelligence – Decision Intelligence - a free form data exploration capability, with no limitations on data access, transparency, and action-oriented insights all delivered via self-service mode. Sitting atop the organization's data, the investigative intelligence tools complement their augmented BI counterparts and provide capabilities that include:

• True search (NLQ), exploration and discovery of data and insights enabled by contextual recommendations
• Multiple degrees of analysis (enabled by their built-in AI / ML algorithms) viz. descriptive, diagnostic, predictive - delivered in real-time and presented in form of charts and narratives (NLG)
• Widen the ‘peripheral vision' to identify hidden data relationships, spot changes, trends, and anomalies
• Autonomous business contextualization by creating knowledge graphs (people, processes, data, etc.)
• Explainability of insights to build trust and transparency

Braced with the capability to provide holistic, trustworthy, and democratized insights to business decision-makers, Decision Intelligence technologies are poised to transform and shorten organizations' data to decisions journey.

5 ways manufacturers can leverage decision intelligence

With the advent and proliferation of Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the manufacturing industry is in midst of a massive digital transformation. On one hand, manufacturers, based on their technological maturity, are challenged with an enormous and ever-growing volume of data that is continuously generated across their supply chain. On the other hand, consumer trends are rapidly changing, and customers are expecting more from their favorite brands in terms of value, quality, service, availability etc. To keep pace with the change, stay relevant and resilient, manufacturers need to optimally exploit the data at scale to drive operational efficiencies, higher levels of service, and support.

Investigative intelligence technologies can help manufacturing organizations to:

The above use cases are just the tip of the iceberg. Decision intelligence has the potential to become a very impactful cog in the manufacturing wheel, bridging the gap between BI technologies and advanced analytics / data science. By embracing decision intelligence technologies, manufacturing leaders (now citizen data scientists) can freely enjoy insights exploration, spend time diagnosing issues, predicting outcomes and simulating scenarios - before taking informed and impactful decisions.