Ansaldo Energia Tackles Data Quality and Tracks Vital Production KPIs with Automated Analytics

Ansaldo Energia has been in operation for nearly 200 years, manufacturing generators and turbines for thermoelectric power plants in more than 90 countries. That all requires intricate planning of projects and resources, to ensure Ansaldo Energia’s customers receive their equipment and components on time and perfectly manufactured.

As a master planner, Guglielmo Mantero works closely with the company’s schedulers, building out short- and long-term strategies for Ansaldo Energia’s manufacturing lines and ensuring the supply chain can support the company’s requirements. “Our time frames are generally six months to a year,” explains Mantero. “But we also do ad hoc short-term planning when necessary.”

Many different departments and teams input data into SAP, which is Ansaldo Energia’s main source of resource planning data. But Mantero and his team found that inaccurate data was negatively affecting the supply chain. “Without the right checks, it’s easy for garbage data to find its way into SAP — and because we pull data from SAP for lots of different systems and processes, that often leads to pollution further down the line,” says Mantero.

Mantero and his team have been working on creating a set of KPIs to help the business ensure its ERP and SCP data is accurate — for example, checking that orders are dated correctly. Orders with the wrong date can result in components being ordered too early or too late, disrupting the manufacturing schedule and the planning department’s carefully prepared budget.

The team needed a new way to monitor these KPIs, keeping a close eye on data quality and the real impact of inaccurate or out-of-date information on Ansaldo Energia’s manufacturing processes.

Mantero was informed of an Alteryx trial within the company and was quick to offer his experience. “I was very keen to volunteer,” says Mantero. “I’ve always loved working with tools like this.”

Following interactive lessons from the Alteryx Academy, Mantero started experimenting with Alteryx Designer, building workflows that could take data from SAP, match the data against other data sets, and output it as a spreadsheet for more hands-on analysis.

So far, Mantero has used Alteryx Designer to create workflows for two KPIs: one that tracks planned and released orders for components and materials, and another which monitors when those items are withdrawn for use in a project.

“Alteryx makes it possible to build out those KPI monitoring processes,” says Mantero. “Spreadsheets just aren’t as reliable; there’s no repeatability. But with Alteryx, the logic is always consistent, which means you can easily use one workflow as a framework for another.”

It’s not just the planning department that’s embracing data and analytics automation. Mantero’s colleagues across supply chain, administration, and finance are also working with Alteryx to accelerate analytics and improve the quality of insights they’re providing to leadership.

In just a few months, Ansaldo Energia has expanded from its initial group of volunteers to more than 25 users who regularly work with Alteryx Designer and run their workflows through Alteryx Server.

For the planning team, automating workflows has been vital for creating an accurate, evolving picture of how the company manages its data — and the knock-on effects inaccurate data can have on manufacturing processes.

“We created our KPIs to improve data quality — the outputs from our Alteryx workflows help us build proof of the problem areas in the company’s data management. That way, we know where to focus our improvement efforts, and people have accountability for their own data.”

And the workflows are already helping improve data management within Ansaldo Energia. For example, in just five months, the planning team increased the percentage of valid orders coming from SAP after identifying problem areas in its generator manufacturing order process. Rising from 75% to 92%, this improvement gave the planners and schedulers a more accurate picture of the upcoming work, helping them budget and plan manufacturing with more confidence.

Ansaldo Energia is seeing success in other departments, too. The finance team has automated data reconciliation, budgeting, profit and loss processes, and more — which will save the company €1 million a year. By reducing the amount of manual work involved, finance has also improved its own data quality, and enabled Ansaldo Energia’s leadership to access insights quickly and more regularly than before.