Last Updated: January 27, 2021
Originally published by Manufacturing Technology Insights
The escalation in the use of technologies like robotic automation, industrial IoT (IIoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) has pushed manufacturing companies toward the fourth industrial revolution— Industry 4.0. Alongside, in order to improve operations, financial planning and forecast upcoming risks, manufacturers are also leveraging predictive analytics, which uses advanced modeling techniques to gain deeper insights into the product usage, consumer behavior, and other key factors affecting the future of their business. There lies a wealth of data outside the company that can prove to be beneficial in unearthing critical insights to drive sustainable growth, and thus needs to be more intelligently harnessed. Most manufacturing companies do not fully realize such insights as they lack the internal expertise to pinpoint the most meaningful factors among the abundant data trove available. To assist companies to more efficiently extract these insights stands a predictive analytics maven—Prevedere. The company leverages an AI-based solution to provide its clients rich insights into the macro economy, industry, and consumer markets in which the business participates.
Most manufacturing companies take a backseat when harnessing macroeconomic insights to strategize a forward-looking view into their business. “We precisely help such manufacturing companies provide better insights into the future direction of their business in the markets in which they participate,” says Rich Fitchen, CRO at Prevedere. By finding the best correlations between the company’s business performances amid the ponderance of external data, Prevedere helps manufacturing companies drive more value into their innovation journey, and at the same time, reduce costs, particularly related to inventory and working capital, reduce risk of market turns (up or down), all while providing better guidance to investors on the business outlook for the company.
To accomplish this feat, Prevedere deploys its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) based predictive analytics engine. “This engine has over 3.5 million data sets staged in it, which forms the base of the analytical processes we conduct,” says Nicole E. Flynn, Senior Director of Marketing at Prevedere. These vetted and categorized data sets include economic trends, consumer behavior, online metrics, and physical world data from various data sources across industries and geographies around the globe. “We keep our data repository continuously updated, helping our clients stay relevant to the ongoing market trends and environmental factors,” mentions Flynn.
Prior to deploying this engine, companies need to collect relevant internal data (usually sales revenue or volume data) from their business systems, cleaning it, and organizing it to how they want to analyze their market segments. The data sets are then run through the Prevedere AI-engine to look for a correlation between this newly-organized data and Prevedere’s data sets. “This gives our manufacturing clients rich insights into the factors driving their business, helping them make the best business moves going forward, ranging from manufacturing planning to production capacity investments to new market growth initiatives,” Fitchen asserts.
Citing one of the recent real-life applications of Prevedere, Fitchen explains how a leading steel manufacturer approached them to find an objective approach to forecasting to complement their internal, sales-driven forecasts. By deploying the Prevedere AI engine, the company was able to gain deeper insights into the drivers of demand for their business and was able to identify “market turns” before their internal forecasts. Now, the company incorporates the insights from Prevedere into its monthly operations planning process, as well as strategic planning, which includes capital investments and other large-scale company decisions.
Displaying such efficiency, Prevedere has not only widened its clientele but also established some meaningful partnerships along the way, including Microsoft and Neilsen. Marching into a brighter future, Prevedere plans on bringing in the aspects of ‘visual representation of data’ into their solution to help clients better interpret the insights. In addition, the company also wants to continue investing in its ML and predictive analytics engine and increase the robustness of the offering. “With these competencies, we intend to help our customers succeed by delivering stronger, more predictable business results,” concludes Fitchen.
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Prevedere was recently named a Top 10 Manufacturing Intelligence Solution Providers – 2019 by Manufacturing Technology Insights magazine.
