Enatel
Industry 4.0 Case Study
A vision for a quality future.
“The team are exploring the generative AI capabilities to enhance Tableau functionality.”
Key benefits
- Generating dashboards from the Data Lake ensures “one source of truth” across reports.
- Access to regularly updated data at the press of the “refresh” button.
- Significant time savings in generating reports.
- Elimination of errors in the reports due to less manual manipulation.
Future Scalability
- Expanding Data Sources and Integration: Enatel aims to expand the range of data sources. This expansion will enable them to offer comprehensive insights, from departmental to Enterprise BI.
- Leveraging AI Capabilities: The team are exploring the generative AI capabilities to enhance Tableau functionality.
- Predictive Metrics: They are also exploring the potential of Einstein Discovery to provide predictive metrics. This feature will allow users to gain insights into possible future trends.
Background
Enatel is a world-leading designer and manufacturer of power management, power conversion and energy storage technology.
Its goal is to enable customers to make the most effective use of their energy through smart, innovative and reliable power solutions.
Enatel is based in Christchurch and has more than 30 years’ experience as an electronics manufacturer. More than 95% of everything it designs and manufactures onsite is exported to over 75 countries.
Intelligent software combined with efficient hardware and decades of power electronics design experience has resulted in solutions that address industry needs.
Opportunity
Enatel is a company renowned for its diverse technology and manufacturing portfolio. It spans customised integrated power solutions to highefficiency modular battery chargers. Within this extensive array of operations lies a wealth of data held within many disparate systems, and the current reporting approach (mainly Excel-based) was struggling to keep pace with demand.
Identifying that there was significant opportunity for improvement, Enatel engaged the services of Parallel42 to advise and assist with the establishment of an integrated data platform and to develop a proof of concept report in Power BI.
The vision was to connect its ERP system to a Data Lake, and to create the proof-of-concept revenue report that could be accessed by the Sales, Finance and Senior Leadership teams.
Solution
During 2023, Enatel’s parent company in the US, having recognised the importance of data and analytics within its businesses, gathered the business units together to roll out a plan to move everyone to the same architecture and reporting platforms. This meant pivoting from the Power BI solution to Tableau.
Having been made aware that this was the direction the group was heading, the Finance team was split into two functions – the Accounting & Control team and a new Performance & Analysis team (aka FP&A). This allowed a dedicated team to focus on the deployment of the Data & Analytics initiative for
Enatel.
The first phase of this deployment at Enatel was considering the data governance and then mapping out the data flow. Having already worked through this data flow with the original proof of concept, this step was easy to achieve.
The second phase was to implement the chosen tools for the data flow and processing. The Data
Ingestion/ETL (Extract, Transfer, Load) tool sits between our ERP and the Data Lake, transferring the required raw data at set intervals automatically.
Tableau then accesses the Data Lake, in this case Snowflake, and the team have designed a dashboard that presents the same information from our original Excel report with easy-to-use filters and toggles that were previously set as individual pivot tables.
Once satisfied that the correct data was flowing, phase three was to test, parallel run and verify the data. The team then got feedback from key users on their experience of using the Tableau dashboard.
Phase four was to go live with the Sales and Finance dashboard and increase the daily load frequency to 8 times in all the environments (Fivetran and Snowflake) to enable Tableau to update every 3 hours.
This is an example of a dashboard created by the team in Tableau:
About the site visits and Industry 4.0
The purpose of the Demonstration Network is to drive uptake of Industry 4.0 technologies among New Zealand manufacturers with the aim of increasing their productivity and global competitiveness. The Network of Sit Visits (NSV) are part of the Industry 4.0 Demonstration Network, which also includes a mobile showcase and smart factory showing cutting-edge Industry 4.0 technologies in action. The NSV takes selected companies through a fully funded assessment process to help them accelerate their own journey towards Industry 4.0, and sees them share their knowledge with other manufacturers.
