Insights — Production Intelligence Articles
Insights
Expert perspectives on manufacturing intelligence, operational efficiency, and the future of industrial data.
Why Mining Companies Are Moving From Spreadsheets to Data Platforms
Mining operations generate extraordinary volumes of data every single day. Mining data analytics platforms are how the industry is finally making sense of it. Production tonnages flow in from multiple pit faces, mill throughput, flotation recovery rates, concentrate...
Microsoft Fabric and Operational Intelligence: Why Data Plumbing Isn’t Data Modeling
Microsoft Fabric is a serious platform. If you work in data engineering or analytics, you’ve likely evaluated it, deployed parts of it, or at least sat through a demo. With over 28,000 organisations now on board, the momentum is real. OneLake delivers on the promise...
What Is the OEE Dollar Bridge? Translating Efficiency Into Profit
Your plant just reported 87% OEE for the month. That's the kind of number that gets circulated in email chains, benchmarked against competitors, and filed away in annual reports. It sounds acceptably close to "good." But here's the question operations teams rarely ask...
Power BI and Capstone: Why the Best Operations Teams Use Both
The Question Everyone Asks "Why do we need a data management platform if we already have Power BI?" It's a fair question. Microsoft Power BI is a legitimate, powerful, well-supported tool, adopted by hundreds of thousands of organisations worldwide, with over 30...
When Your Dashboard Talks Back: How MCP Is Changing Industrial Data
What if you could ask your production data a question and get an answer? MCP turns passive dashboards into conversational intelligence — from 80 minutes to 2 minutes.
Real-Time Is for Alarms. Daily Is for Decisions.
Industry 4.0 says faster is always better. But the most important number in your plant doesn’t need to update every second. Daily is the sweet spot between real-time noise and monthly surprises.
From OEE Percentage to Dollar Impact: The Bridge Your CFO Is Missing
87% OEE sounds acceptable. That 13% gap cost $8,200 in lost profit today. Here’s how to translate operational percentages into the financial language your CFO needs.
Why Spreadsheets Lie About Cost Per Unit (And What It’s Costing You)
Your enterprise ‘average’ cost per unit is probably wrong. Averaging ratios across sites is mathematically incorrect — here’s the structural flaw and how to fix it.
What Did Yesterday’s Production Actually Cost?
Your historian knows how many bottles came off the line. But what did it cost? The answer is hidden across fragmented systems — and the spreadsheet treadmill isn’t fast enough.