– and what’s replacing them
Industries are entering a new era where analytics tools must be visual, scalable, and built for engineers on the front line for fast insights and ultimately increase productivity.
The landscape of modern manufacturing is evolving quickly. Driven by increasingly complex processes and challenges such as rapid changes in customer demand, enterprises need the most advanced data analytics tools available to gain a competitive edge.
In this fast-moving environment, the limitations of traditional tools are becoming all too apparent, leaving engineers and decision-makers struggling to keep pace. For too long, businesses have relied on one of two approaches to data analysis, neither of which is particularly well suited for the agility and depth that businesses now require.
On the one hand, there are general analytics tools which often lack the exploratory depth needed to uncover issues or identify new opportunities. “These tools are often pretty generic,” explains Alessandro Chimera, Industry Solutions Lead at Spotfire. “They’re just answering a question that you know already or generating reports for upper management, or your colleagues.”
Then on the other hand, there are very specific statistical tools wielded by a relatively small number of data scientists, which Chimera says, can be incredibly difficult to use. “You pretty much need a statistics degree. Don't get me wrong, statistics tools are very useful, but the actual statisticians are typically a service bureau in the organization with sometimes long waiting lists,” he adds. While excellent for prototyping complex algorithms, these specialist solutions often ‘fall short when it comes to enterprise-wide scalability and integration into daily operations’, Chimera argues.
Already the tangible benefits of visual data science are evident in several diverse manufacturing sectors. A prime example is Brembo, a world leader in disc brake technology. As part of its Industry 4.0 initiative, Brembo faced the challenge of making sense of a big data environment and evolving its analytics infrastructure. “Spotfire became a new standard for analytics at the Brembo Group,” explains Paolo Crovetti, Chief Information Officer at Brembo.
The platform’s adaptability allowed it to be used across the organization for several functions including manufacturing process optimization, quality control, R&D, and even predictive maintenance for machine tools. As Crovetti notes: “With Spotfire we are able to discover and rationalize a lot of information that was otherwise not possible.” Now there are over 2000 Spotfire users in the company with its tools helping to increase revenue at the disc brake specialist by a massive 25%.
Nor is Brembo the only company benefiting from using the visual data science platform. When it comes to semiconductor manufacturing, Spotfire offers profound advantages over existing platforms, claims Spotfire’s Alessandro Chimera. "Popular analytics platforms excel at producing visual reports and dashboards for business users, but they fall short in manufacturing, particularly when engineers need to solve complex problems,” he says. "Traditional tools just hold engineers back. Today’s challenges demand platforms that amplify expertise, helping to ask and answer the right questions faster. Speed is so important.”
Real-world impact: from disc brakes to semiconductors
A recent advance is the inclusion of natural language interrogation through Spotfire Copilot, the AI-powered assistant. This makes advanced analytics available by allowing users to speak their questions, such as ‘compare defect rates by equipment over the last quarter’ or ‘find variables most correlated with yield drop’. Spotfire Copilot then intelligently suggests the most relevant visualizations, providing explanations for each of its findings.
“With the introduction of nine new chart types, including tree maps and pie charts, our latest release - Spotfire Copilot 2.0 - provides even greater flexibility in how you visualize data through natural language interaction,” explains Spotfire’s Alessandro Chimera. It can even integrate unstructured documents, such as PDFs, enabling users to upload machinery manuals and research papers, which Copilot can then query and transform into actionable insights. “This significantly reduces the time previously spent manually sifting through documents,” adds Chimera. “For novice customers it means they can start playing around with the tool and getting results in no time at all.”
Power of natural language: Spotfire Copilot
Why traditional analytics fall short in modern manufacturing
Discover more about Spotfire and what it can do for your business here
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We're Michigan's largest single energy user[...] We found Spotfire software to be one of the critical tools to increase energy efficiency.
Keith Carey, Chief Information Officer, Hemlock Semiconductor Operations
Looking to the future, Spotfire is strategically refocusing on domain-specific industries while developing more specialized capabilities. This includes investments in custom visualizations such as wafer maps, which are not found in general visualization software. The company is also enhancing the underlying platform to enable further customization by its customers. Spotfire’s Brad Hopper encapsulates this future vision: “We’re striving to become the high-tech manufacturing software of record for every company we can,” he says. “I know our customers will appreciate that because they’ve been pulling us to do it for so many years.”
For far too long, manufacturers have relied on two types of tools for data analysis. Either they can use generic BI tools that address questions they often already know the answer to, or they can use more specific statistical tools that are only understood by a few data scientists and which often don’t scale particularly well. However, visual data science tools such as Spotfire help to democratize data by allowing users to interrogate data visually and collaboratively without necessarily needing to be data scientists. Concludes Brad Hopper: “Spotfire is designed for ‘smart people’ – engineers and scientists with specialized knowledge who need tools that magnify their ability to ask and answer questions.”
Strategic advantage through visual data science
In response to these shortcomings, a new ‘third way’ is emerging: visual data science. Companies such as Spotfire are positioning themselves as a crucial bridge, combining interactive visualizations with advanced analytics to solve complex, industry-specific business problems.
Importantly, Spotfire moves beyond simply answering known questions to actively helping users discover the unknown within their data. Using the AI-powered Recommendation Engine, Spotfire will suggest appropriate visualizations and insights for selected data sets, while for those who want advanced analytics, it's possible to integrate Python or R scripts within the Spotfire interface that extend and customize the analysis.
One of the most significant advantages of its platform is that it enables the democratization of data analysis. By leveraging intuitive, interactive dashboards and the AI-powered Recommendation Engine, Spotfire lowers the barriers to entry for non-specialist users including engineers, operations managers, and even business leaders.
Explaining the platform’s design philosophy, Brad Hopper, VP of Vertical Markets at Spotfire says: “What’s been missing in this market is a technology that’s the engineer’s best friend, helping you to connect all those different systems, merge the data and make calculations as well as both ask and answer questions in the fastest possible way to solve problems.” This vision of bringing “the human mind directly in contact with the data via interactive visual software” is central to Spotfire’s approach.
Democratizing data: empowering a broader workforce
Disclaimer: The Reuters news staff had no role in the production of this content. It was created by Reuters Plus, the brand marketing studio of Reuters. To work with Reuters Plus, contact us here.
Conversely, Spotfire can provide specialist visualizations, such as wafer maps, enabling engineers to analyze defect zones and correlate failure patterns across production stages. Chimera explains how this helps to predict yield drops. “Since you are doing multiple tests, you can already predict if the yield you are getting out of the wafer is the yield you were expecting. If it’s not, then you refer to the yield engineer to investigate the root causes and contribute to implementing corrective actions in the fab.” This proactive approach can help save significant time and resources by identifying issues before they escalate.
Certainly, the quantifiable impact is compelling. Cadeon, a Spotfire partner specializing in data visualization training, reports that clients can achieve “10% efficiency increases after implementing data-driven strategies”, while the platform enables “statistical process control (SPC) calculations and color-coded capability charts in under one minute versus 45 minutes manually.”
One success story is Hemlock Semiconductor (HSC), which leveraged Spotfire for a peak power management program. “This program has not only allowed our electric utility to better manage its total demand, but it has also saved HSC approximately $300,000 a month,” says Keith Carey, Chief Information Officer, Hemlock Semiconductor Operations. “We're Michigan's largest single energy user,” he adds. “We found Spotfire software to be one of the critical tools to increase energy efficiency.”
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