Manufacturing industry, in the past 20 years, have been able to reduce the quantity of wastage and the variability in the production process and improve their product quality after implementing Lean and Six Sigma programs. However, extreme variations are found in certain processing environments. Thus manufacturers need a better approach that would remove such flaws and advanced analytics helps in this way. In manufacturing, managers use advanced analytics to identify patterns of data, relationships among discrete process steps and inputs and then optimize the factors that greatly affect the yields. Advanced analytics also helps to increase yield. Manufacturers that want to use advanced analytics to improve yield, consider how much data the company has at its disposal, as their first step. Some companies have too little data to be statistically meaningful and the challenge for these companies lies in taking a long-term focus and investing in systems and practices to collect more data. Advanced analytics and big data forms a critical tool to realize improvements in yield. Process complexity, process variability, and capacity restraints are present in such manufacturing environment. Read more at: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/operations/how_big_data_can_improve_manufacturing