Driving Industrial Resilience using AWS-Driven Manufacturing Control Tower for a Leading Specialty Chemicals Manufacturer

Client 

The client is a specialty chemical company that caters to the food, beverage, pharma, and personal care industries. It offers a broad array of meticulously developed products to address its clients’ changing needs. Client’s unwavering commitment to sustainability and social responsibility is apparent in its initiatives to reduce environmental impact and uphold ethical practices throughout its manufacturing processes and supply chain.

Business Challenge 

The client had 40+ global manufacturing facilities, and each of them worked with multiple external vendors to meet its operational needs. Most of the facilities worked in silos and used non-standard processes and KPI measurement methodologies. They also used multiple disparate data-capturing solutions. Due to this, the client did not have visibility into its operations and strategic supply chain management. Thus, it could not visualize the performance against the expenses incurred across its business units and product lines.

The client also wanted to assess its vendors’ performance and quality to ensure a resilient supply chain, foster a culture of productivity and a common measurement method, and enhance site accountability. To do this, it sought a partner who could create a unified data platform and enterprise dashboard that would provide advanced analytical insights and drive data-driven decisions through effective agile methodology. It required supply chain control tower solutions with the capability of tracking the following KPIs:

• Manufacturing performance
• Freight spends
• Warehouse spend
• Quality performance

LTM Solution 

• Conducted detailed discovery sessions with the multiple teams involved in the process to understand the existing architecture and identify the chain of authority, accountability, and responsibility.
• Leveraged a well-architected platform using standardized tools such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glue, PowerBI, and Greengrass to implement advanced supply chain resilience strategies.
• Designed and developed a Data Warehouse (DW)-based Single Source of Truth (SSOT) for both OT and IT datasets.
• Enabled data democratization by providing higher visibility into manufacturing, operations, energy costs, logistics, and so on.
• Ensured data governance by applying well-defined data lifecycle and access controls through Snowflake cloud migration.
• Ensured data and template harmonization by standardizing the incoming data from multiple disparate systems.

Business Benefits 

• Facilitated informed decisions by accessing real-time data of the entire manufacturing process.
• Tracked key KPIs to measure manufacturing performance, freight spending, warehouse spending, and equipment maintenance and quality.
• Standardized the calculation of manufacturing process metrics across sites.
• Enabled a single view for management/leaders to have a comparative study for different plants.
• Enabled data migration, data governance, comparative studies, and improved efficiencies.
• Improved manufacturing productivity and logistics targeting yield energy and throughput and achieved cost optimization.
• Enabled additional predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities to drive these intelligent responses and optimizations.