At HARMAN, our teams manage a highly complex global supply chain, comprised of more than ten manufacturing plants and thousands of suppliers, components, and finished goods for both our automotive and audio divisions. Now more than ever, we are harnessing the power of analytics to help gain better insights and certainty, especially during uncertain times, all in an effort to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations.
In 2020, faced with significant global supply chain volatility as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, HARMAN relied on its Analytics Team for rapid analytics empowerment, insights, and outcomes to help solve some of the organizations’ most pressing challenges. And, the team’s hard work and dedication did not go unnoticed. We are honored to be named to the Drexel LeBow Analytics 50, an annual award that recognizes organizations using analytics to solve business challenges presented by Drexel University LeBow College of Business.
Addressing Challenges Swiftly
At the beginning of last year, our teams were faced with a multitude of questions, including: How do we address the immediate challenges and risks that COVID-19 introduced to HARMAN’s workforce, suppliers, manufacturing plants, and customers? How do we plan to rescale with agility in mind? How will we adapt to the longer-term effects of the pandemic and reimagine the status quo? To address these questions and the business impacts of the global pandemic, including disruptions in the supply chain and fluctuating demand, our teams required detailed visibility into HARMAN’s ecosystem of processes.
This visibility into our business developments on a real-time basis is critical to ensuring we continue to meet customer commitments, and HARMAN’s teams knew there was no time to waste. Within a matter of weeks, the Analytics team created an array of new capabilities that, pre-crisis, might have taken months or longer to fully come to fruition. With the support of our strategic technology partners at Attunity, Snowflake, Qlik, and Axis Group, the team developed new data analytics solutions on a robust, scalable platform that quickly provided data integration, aggregation, visualization, and self-service capabilities for our global supply chain. Featuring several dashboards and analytics applications, the new solution helped manage a real-time, 360-degree view of supply and demand fluctuations.
Achieving Success through Data Empowerment
The impact of the new analytics applications was an immediate and ongoing success. As a result of its implementation, more than 600 active users from across the organization, including the global supply chain, procurement, and quality divisions, continue to be empowered to make data-informed decisions and quickly respond to the ongoing supply chain challenges as well as new, unique challenges. By focusing on four major tactics – to align with business priorities, provide a single source of truth, deploy agile development, and connect cross-functional teams – the new analytics solutions has enhanced demand forecasting accuracy, improved customer fulfillment and on-time deliveries, and more.
At HARMAN, we believe that the best solutions are ones that empower learning through data and insights, and we remain dedicated to building our Analytics team and their capabilities so they can reach their highest potential and continue to effectively partner with all business units and leaders – and help them navigate the latest supply chain shortages. It’s a demonstration of our commitment to providing an exceptional user experience designed to meet customers’ needs while allowing them to grow and succeed in the face of critical component constraints (including semi-conductors).
“Without the support of the Analytics Team, we would have been unable to react to the challenges fast enough to keep our plants going,” said Harry Andersson Bettencourt, HARMAN’s Chief of Staff and former Chief Supply Chain & Operations Officer. “The power and productivity unleashed with the help of the Analytics team is a game changer for us. This will drive a significant culture change in our organization to be able to effectively use all the information available in our many systems in real time.”
Following the success of the new analytics offerings, HARMAN is continuing to invest in our analytics teams and cutting-edge digital transformation capabilities to encourage analytics adoption, knowledge-sharing, and data literacy across all divisions. This pioneering blend of supply chain analytics solutions paired with new investments in digital transformation is a critical step in empowering our analytics teams to become even more resilient and help make our organization more agile for whatever challenges the future may hold. As future-proof organizations increasingly look at actionable insights to meet their business goals, our entrepreneurial analytics teams at HARMAN are the secret sauce to helping us deliver unprecedented innovation and experiences to our customers.