Manufacturing insights offer a comprehensive view of your production processes, providing data on efficiency, costs, and capacity utilization. This helps you track manufacturing performance, identify bottlenecks, and optimize resource allocation. By leveraging these insights, you can enhance operational efficiency, control costs, and improve overall productivity, ensuring your manufacturing operations run smoothly and effectively.
As a manufacturer, understanding your manufacturing costs, material usage, and resource usage is crucial to running a profitable business. Manufacturing Insights displays dashboards that offer insight into areas of your manufacturing operations, allowing you to make more informed decisions to increase your bottom line.
Note: Manufacturing insights are only usable through the Advanced Manufacturing add-on (you need to be on a Standard plan or higher to use this Add-on)
Dashboards provide important insight into the health of your business, allowing you to quickly find details on:
Manufacturing cost trends (over time)
Material usage trends (over time)
Resource usage trends (over time)
The cost of different manufacturing operations
Which materials are the most expensive
Which resources and materials are the most used
Important details regarding manufacturing insights
Data is based on all manufacturing orders
Price amounts are in your base currency, excluding taxes.
Date range on all dashboards is a mixture of completed orders based on Done date and all Open orders based on Delivery deadline
Data refreshes every 10 minutes
Accessing manufacturing insights
To review manufacturing insights, open the Insights screen and select the Manufacturing tab.
From here, you'll find 3 manufacturing reports — Cost overview, Ingredients, and Resources.
The three types of manufacturing reports
The manufacturing tab consists of three unique reports with different angles on manufacturing data.
Cost overview report
Provides a general overview of your manufacturing costs over a set period of time. You can analyze production costs and identify areas where to reduce expenses, track their costs over time, see how they have changed, and analyze cost breakdown by material and operating expenses.
The Cost overview report helps answer questions such as:
How does the manufacturing cost trend over time? (learn how to set a filter)
Which products are the most expensive to produce?
What is the cost breakdown between materials and resources? (How to select on a chart)
Which products have the highest manufacturing costs?
What are the total manufacturing costs for the year?
Ingredients report
Provides insights into material usage across manufacturing operations, thus making it easier to track changes in material costs and keep products priced accordingly.
The Ingredients report helps answer questions such as:
How is the material usage trending over time?
Which materials have a discrepancy between planned and actual usage?
Which materials are the most expensive?
Which products use the most materials?
Which materials are used in which products?
What are the total material costs for the year? (How to use pivot tables).
Resources report
Provides insights into the usage of resources across manufacturing operations, making it easier to track changes in resource costs and optimize your manufacturing process.
The Resources report helps answer questions such as:
How is resource usage trending over time?
Which resources and operations have a discrepancy between planned and actual usage?
Which resources are the most expensive?
What are the total resource costs for the year? (How to use pivot tables).
Creating custom dashboards
For a more customized dashboard, you can export data from insights pages by using the download button available on each data element.
You can also use our integration with Easy Insight to access visual dashboards for manufacturing analysis and create your own reports, or use SyncHub to access Katana's data model and create custom reports with BI tools (eg. PowerBI, Tableau, Excel, etc.).
Tips and tricks
Katana Insights is a modern dashboarding tool with great flexibility to filter, sort, and drill into data. This makes it easier to find the information you need quickly.
When accessing a report, you can filter the data by date, customer, product category, or product. You can also interact with charts and cross-filter the data by selecting a value on a chart. For example, you can select a specific time period on a line chart by dragging and selecting a date range.
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