The Data Heads

If you’re connected to the foods industry, mark your calendar for October 6 at 1pm EDT.

That’s the date we’ve set for our brand new web seminar “How Best-in-Class Food Processing Companies Drive Profits, Increase Efficiency and Reduce Risk”

Over the years, my colleague Tom Albrecht (our VP Bus Dev) has worked with a lot of people in the foods industry, and he has had an amazing range of experiences. I don’t think there’s much he hasn’t seen in one form or another.

I’ve asked him to try to boil it all down to the essence and present it to you on Oct 6 in 45 minutes or less.

This isn’t going to be a sales pitch. Tom is going to share his experience with best-in-class customers and back it up with research provided by the Aberdeen Group. It will be solid content that your team can sink their teeth into.

The seminar is free, and will be delivered to your desk top. But you need to register by following this link. You can also read our press release here.

Hope to see you there. Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

I just got off the phone with Kris Deckard, the Director of Ready Indiana. Ready Indiana is my state’s effort to help Indiana businesses “Engage, Elevate and Educate our Workforce.”  In the last few months we’ve seen a modest uptick in customers calling us from across the country with the news that they’ve received a training grant from some regional or state agency for training and workforce development. I wanted more of that, so I had tracked Kris down using Google.

These training grants seem like such a win-win.

I don’t think we have any customers who are over-trained; people will always be able to get more value out of a tool that they really know and understand.  Knowing more about the tool can translate directly into higher individual worker productivity and effectiveness. If you’ve been following my last few posts you know that that can turn into huge increases in throughput and quality, and huge decreases in downtime, rework, repair, and other wastes.

But in a recessionary economy, a lot of manufacturers are squeezing every gram of copper out of every penny they have. Training budgets are one of the first things to get slashed. So investing in training is one use of stimulus money that makes an awful lot of sense. Of course I’m biased, because the money eventually trickles down to me and enables me to create and retain jobs. Like I said, I wanted more of this.

Kris confirmed that American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) does have substantial funds available for workforce development. Actually the buzz word these days is “Incumbent Worker Training”.

In Indiana there is a special grant called the Skill Enhancement Fund (SEF – these people seem to be huge believers in the wonder of acronyms). SEF will pay out up to $200,000 every two years to employers so they can train or retrain their workers.  The grants are especially supportive of manufacturers. Eligible training activities specifically mention “Quality-Assurance Skills: Skills that are intended to increase the quality of the company’s product (Statistical Process Control [SPC], Total Quality Management [TQM], ISO and QS).”

So if you’re one of our Indiana customers, contact me and I’ll introduce you to Kris. She’ll guide you through the application process maze.

Which brings me to the bad news, if there is bad news. There is no centralized clearing house for this information. It seems very regionally based. Actually Indiana seems progressive compared to some other states where grants are administered through regions that may be as small as a couple of counties. So navigating the maze may be difficult.

Have you checked what’s available in your area? What is your company doing to develop you and your staff? Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

I’m working on a case study with one of my customers that I think you’ll be interested in. I’m just beginning to put it together now, but I thought you’d appreciate a sneak preview. I’ll let you know when the final article is ready.

Last fall this customer came to us with a sizeable integration and customization project. It came at a time when the financial and manufacturing world seemed to be falling down around us. I was, frankly, surprised that they wanted to spend that kind of money at the same time that banks and investment firms were collapsing, the stock market was imploding, and businesses were shedding employees like autumn leaves.

But we worked with him through our standard process of defining the project and formalizing a Statement of Work. We launched the project right around the new year. During that process, my customer agreed to meet with me in six months to do a post-mortem on the project. He said he’d be willing to open his books so we could evaluate – objectively – whether the project was paying for itself.

We finally got together last month – seven months after we finished our deployment. True to his word, he did open his books to me and demonstrated – with CFO-approved numbers – that he had paid for the initial investment in less than three months.

Many organizations look for a two-year payback. He had achieved his in an eighth of that time.

Now, seven months into the project, he had documented an ROI of 171%.

That got my attention.

We started by reviewing the work we had done with his team.  This was a truly collaborative effort. His engineers had done an exceptionally fine job of building the foundation for the project, and then worked with my staff to implement the solution. Together they did a fantastic job of automating and integrating a variety of work flows and data systems. The result was a streamlined process for tracking repair and rework processes across multiple departments.

It was the classic tactic of “reduce the cost of data”. I knew that going into the debriefing meeting. And I expected that the ROI would be based on the efficiencies gained by eliminating islands of data, removing duplicate data entry, and integrating disparate data systems.  I expected that he paid for the project by eliminating staff (I knew the company was going through a downsizing concurrent with our project) through automation.  Clearly we were helping this customer move laterally on the Data Cost / Value Matrix from expensive data to low cost data.

As we dove into the data, I found a number of surprises.

First, he didn’t eliminate any jobs because of this project. As he reduced rework he reassigned the rework staff to more productive activities. They shifted from non-value-added status (overhead) to value-added production staff.

Second, reducing the cost of the data contributed only about 2% to the ROI. It was such a puny number. I had expected reducing the cost of the data would account for maybe 50% or 60% of the cost savings.

The lion’s share of the ROI came from improved throughput. Cheaper, more reliable, and more accessible data enabled his staff to drive defects out of the process. Reducing defects increased first pass yield. This resulted in lower WIP (work in process), faster product delivery cycle times, and improved order to cash cycle times.

How are you looking at ROI? Do you ever understate (as I was tempted to do) the benefit you get from the value of the data? Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

Last week a colleague sent me a link to a new white paper that you should take a look at. It is published by SAP and titled “Reaping the benefits of next generation dashboards.” You can download your own copy from The Dashboard Spy.

The white paper describes the problems it sees with current dashboard and business intelligence solutions (they are inflexible and too cumbersome to use). And it offers a punch list of features for what it describes as the “Next Generation Dashboard”. Here is the list:

Next Generation Dashboards must:

• Be easy to build and customize
• Provide a consolidated view from any data source
• Leverage visualization to make information easy to consume
• Offer engaging interactivity for further analysis
• Provide the information in a personalized and easy to understand format
• Allow developers to extend new features or integrate to new technology

The white paper concludes with a list of the benefits users can expect to see from these next generation dashboards.

As I read the report I wondered how this vision of the Next Generation Dashboard matched our vision of the data driven organization as defined by the Data Cost / Value Matrix. (If you haven’t already taken the Free On-line Gap Analysis you might want to do that before you read more. It only takes a few minutes.)

The Data Cost / Value Matrix  identifies four aspects of Data Cost and four aspects of Data Value. You can read more about this at the background page.

Let’s take the four aspects of Data Costs and see how the white paper approaches them:

Complete: We collect all the data we need, and no more than is necessary.

The white paper seems to begin with the assumption that we have all the data that we need, and that all data are good, reliable, and necessary.

My experience is that most organizations are smothered in data. Typically it is the wrong data. All too often organizations focus their attention on the data they CAN get, and do not spend enough energy on the data they SHOULD get.

When we make the wrong data more actionable we have gained nothing.

I think the Six Sigma Master Black Belt described in this case study from a financial services firm was right on track when she engaged in manual data collection first because she “was able to gain valuable insight into the nuances of the various operational definitions used by the process owners, and in the way the information system supported or did not support those definitions.”

This white paper overlooks this issue.

Automated: We write down very little data. In fact, we type very little data into computer systems. We use bar codes, RFID or other identification technologies. We capture data from digital equipment whenever possible. Wherever possible we have eliminated human interaction with data collection, and we are confident through data driven statistically valid measurement system analysis that the data are reliable.

The white paper is very strong on the first part of this because of its emphasis on the integration and interconnectivity of data systems. At the same time, it seems unaware of Measurement Systems Analysis and the contribution it should make to this process. It may be the MSA is too technical and therefore beyond the scope of this kind of white paper. However, the world envisioned by the white paper – where everything is fully automated – overlooks the premise that we need to be thoughtful about our data.

One of my favorite business quotes is by Peter Drucker: “Nothing is worse than making more efficient what should not be done at all.”

Integrated: We have specialized data systems to run various aspects of our business, but we don’t have silos of data that are used for only one purpose when the data can be useful to other applications. Put another way, data is never entered more than one time anywhere in our business.

This is one area where the vision of the next generation dashboard is in close alignment with the Cost / Value Matrix.

Accessible: Anyone can get to the data they need at any time. We don’t have to rely on specialists to write special queries or export data. We’ve learned that our people do not need to be programmers to make good use of data.

Clearly the white paper is aligned with this aspect of reducing the cost of data. This comes up several times in the article, as in this quote: “the next generation of dashboards empower non-IT professionals to design and connect business data to a dashboard interface.”

So the white paper endorses integration, accessibility, and automation. It seems to fall short on the issues of completeness and data reliability.

Lets turn out attention to the four aspects of Data Value.

Product Release & Control: We use data to validate that our products are acceptable for shipment. This data is primarily accept/reject type data, and may be based on either measurements or some other kind of pass/fail criteria. The pass/fail criteria is based on the voice of the customer.

The white paper jumps on this with both feet. Under the heading “Leverage visualization to make information easy to consume” it suggests a product release and control strategy as one of the fundamental ways users should consume information: “In addition to robust data visualization, next generation dashboards provide methods to visually alert a user when performance indicators are out of tolerance, then enable the exploration of details with point and click simplicity.”

This is a great example of a Product Release & Control approach to the world: Test a result against the tolerance ( tolerance = specifications = Voice of Customer) and alert the user when something fails. Clearly this is a huge advantage to companies to get this kind of information – especially if it is provided in real time so that prompt corrective action can be implemented.

Process Control: We apply statistical process control tests to key products and processes. These activities use the Voice of the Process to determine the stability of our process. We react immediately to instability and unexpected variation.

On the issue of Process Control, the white paper falls completely silent. There is no indication that the authors understand this critical point of delivering value with data.

It may be that this is an oversight. More likely it is a point of value that is not appreciated by the authors. Making this a point of value assumes that the user understands the difference between Voice of Process and Voice of Customer. In my experience this distinction is not commonly understood. Even people who have been through Six Sigma training or who are certified quality engineers sometimes confuse the issue. We readily understand “outside the specs”. We’re far less likely to embrace or distinguish the more abstract “out of control”.

This is an important short-coming in this vision of the Next Generation Dashboard.

Continuous Process Improvement: We use data to close the loop on our processes and drive continuous improvement. All of our people are trained to use this data to look for hidden sources of variation and correlation between key input and key output variables.

According to the white paper, the fundamental benefit of implementing Next Generation Dashboards is to improve processes:

Notably, C-level executives use business intelligence to improve processes, ensure compliance, optimize marketing efforts, and increase sales. And department managers can use the information to improve their operations and monitor the performance of their groups.

In another section of the white paper, the authors note that Next Generation Dashboards should “enable the exploration of details with point and click simplicity.”

Clearly these are signs of commitment to continuous process improvement. I wonder, however, if the proliferation of dashboard tools will be matched with a similar effort to make sure people use the data in meaningful ways.

My mother spent her career teaching fourth grade. I’m old enough to remember the alarm bells she rang when pocket calculators were first introduced: “But will these kids actually understand the answers they’re coming up with? Or will they just get wrong answers faster and assume that they’re right because a computer spat it out at them?”  The older I get, the more I see what she warned against. This situation is a grown up version of the same problem.

Data Visibility & Transparency: Our data is readily visible at all levels of the organization. Every stakeholder, from process owners to the leadership team, can put their fingers on the performance data that matters to them. Information is summarized in easy-to-understand dashboards that help them separate signal from noise so they don’t react to the wrong things. Furthermore, they can readily get to the underlying data to better understand the drivers of their key metrics.

This is actually a pretty good summary to the Next Generation Dashboard White Paper. Clearly the authors “get” this vision.

In summary, the white paper is in alignment on many aspects of the Data Cost / Value Matrix. There are a few points where it falls short. Most notably if falls short in its vision of the importance (or the real cost) of complete and accurate data, and the value it places on the Voice of Process.

The fundamental assumption of this white paper is that business processes can be characterized by data. If we set aside the (very important) questions about the reliability and repeatability of data for just a minute, the question that comes to the forefront is “what theory shall we apply to the data that characterizes this business process?” Or, in the words of Dr. Deming, “By what method?” shall we reach our goals?

If we fail to attend to the Voice of the Process, our efforts will certainly be suboptimized. GainSeeker Suite and GainSeeker’s Enterprise Dashboard implement all of the requirements outlined by the white paper for the Next Generation Dashboard and they make it very easy to pay attention to the voice of the process.

What do you think? How important is the Voice of the Process in your dashboard? What are you doing today to build dashboards for your business?  Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

If you haven’t been following it, the discussion about the data shuffle has been continuing over at LInkedIn.

Laura Wright posted a comment yesterday:

Is there SOME value to the ‘data shuffle’? E.g., deep knowledge that can help the green or black belt discern nuances to their process analysis that otherwise wouldn’t be had…and so a better solution comes to light? Don’t get me wrong – I do believe data shuffle is wasteful…but some fruit can be gleaned from the exercise.

I think this is a great question, and I agree with her comment. But I also wanted to push the topic out a little further.

I was still trying to formulate a response when Terri Jostes weighed back in with a comment that said what I wanted to say far better than I could have:

I agree with Laura in that there is no substitute for an intimate knowledge of your data. Understanding where it came from, what it means and the process used to acquire the data is absolutely critical. But after that’s been figured out, a mechanism for streaming process data to managers and process improvement experts has to be put in place to free your belts from the ongoing task of “cleaning up” the data or linking files from multiple databases so it can be used.

In the interest of full disclosure I need to point out that Terri is a former user of the GainSeeker Suite. She comes to this after having lived with the data shuffle and found a different way of life. Actually some years ago I wrote up a case study about the experience of an unnamed Master Black Belt (who I just ‘outed’) at a financial services firm. Here is a link to read the case study, Building a Six Sigma Measurement System in Financial Services. At the end of the case study is a section on Lessons Learned, and the first lesson addressed this very point. Here is an excerpt:

Upstream manual data collection – According to the MBB who led the cycle-time-reduction initiative, the initial effort of capturing data manually first paid huge dividends as the deployment progressed. By engaging in manual data collection, the MBB was able to gain valuable insight into the nuances of the various operational definitions used by the process owners, and in the way the information system supported or did not support those definitions.

While an automated system has proved invaluable for collecting and analyzing massive amounts of transactional data, it is essential to develop an intimate, hands-on relationship with data in order to understand the system that produced it. This principle applies to any initiative or project that is focused on deriving long-term, leveraged benefit from an automated measurement system.

This lesson was reinforced later when the MBB implemented a similar measurement system in another part of the business. In this second application, she believed she knew enough about the system to go straight to automated data collection, but she discovered that there was no shortcut to forming a thorough understanding of the data by collecting it manually first. The second application took far longer to deploy, with many more false starts before realizing success.

Does this sound familiar to you? Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, or leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

Forrest Breyfogle posted a great question over at Linked-In:

Does our corporate leadership’s relationship-building strengths make it a challenge for them to truly understand and resolve the fundamental system improvement and re-engineering needs of the financial crisis?

From examination of the myers-briggs personality types we note that not everyone thinks the same. One observation is that some people tend to be systems thinkers and others are not. Systems thinkers, according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator [MBTI] manual, are those persons who have NT temperament and make up only 15% of the U.S. male population (female is less). My hypothesis is that high level government and business decision makers do not tend to be system thinkers because it takes a lot of relationship building to move upward. If this is true, many of our overall decision makers can have a very difficult time approaching the economic crisis as a system issue that needs process improvement/re-engineering. What are your thoughts?

I think Breyfogle may be on to something. I’ve taken the MBTI, and I’m an NT. I realize that I think differently from a lot of people.

What I’ve learned, however, is that ready access to real-time data helps people who are not systems thinkers see connections they would otherwise miss. That’s why having a good theory of data and making data more visible and accessible is so important. That is how you turn data into knowledge.

The follow-up comments are interesting and reveal a wide range of opinions about the underlying causes (and subsequent improvements needed) of the recession.  My own opinion?

What the MBTI doesn’t address is the question of values raised by some other commentators. Is the term ‘free market’ used in the way classical economists advocated: a market free from monopoly power, business fraud, political insider dealing and special privileges for vested interests? Or is it used in the more modern sense: free for predators to exploit victims without public regulation or economic policemen?

I own a small business and I don’t favor regulation, but I’m outraged at the way the marketplace has become free to enable Ponzi schemes and other scams to proliferate.

As a data guy and a systems thinker I would like to see us make better business decisions based on systems theory and data. But it has to be exercised in a free market that is fair and equitable, and that doesn’t reward theft.

What’s your personality type? Do you agree that it affects the way you view problems?  Which type of ‘Free Market’ do you advocate? You can leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

This week MSNBC moved in next door and started a series called The Elkhart Project. Elkhart is our neighboring town, and it has become the poster child for the impact of the recession on middle America. President Obama has visited a couple of times.  After his election Obama chose Elkhart for his first trip outside of Washington in order to promote his economic stimulus package.

Our town, Goshen, is a little sister to Elkhart, and there is no doubt that the entire county has been hard hit in the last year. In February, unemployment in our county topped 18%. Our economy is heavily dependent on manufacturing jobs, and many of those are – excuse me – were in the recreational vehicle, manufactured housing and mobile home industry. Another sizeable segment of the economy serves the auto industry. So, as this blog post points out, we’ve had most of our eggs in one basket.

It doesn’t take a lot to imagine what an 18%+ unemployment rate does to ancillary businesses. These days you probably don’t need to make a reservation at a restaurant, and my friends in plumbing and construction businesses are – well – hurting.

As I’ve read all this coverage I want to say “Yes, but…”

Yes, but it’s not all doom and gloom. There is a little diversity in our economy. Our business, for example, helps manufacturers cut costs and improve efficiencies. We find that if we tune out the main stream media, we don’t see much difference in our activities or the demand for our products and services.

It’s oversimplified, but we’ve found that the manufacturing world has split into two camps. Some people are hunkering down and conserving every penny they can. This is understandable in a world where all the rules about credit that we’ve become accustomed to have been turned upside down.

But the other camp is retaining and even cautiously investing in people and systems that help them improve their operations. We’re talking to this second group.

This is the group that sees the opportunity to reduce material costs by 10% to 30%.

This is the group that wants to improve overall equipment effectiveness by 15%.

This is the group that wants to improve process cycle times by 90%.

Some of these are even located in Elkhart.

There are other success stories in our county. For example, The Red Post has a cool electronic signage product they’re delivering all over the country.

Another exciting business is Lucid Energy, which intends to revolutionize the way the world creates and delivers electricity.

I don’t know anything about the finances of either of these companies, but they’re demonstrating the innovation, wonderful entrepreneurial spirit that is so prevalent in our county, and I’m betting they’re doing just fine. We are.

What about you? Is your company seeing the opportunities, or only the bad news?  You can leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

A recent article on SearchDataManagement.com about a Gartner Group conference on Business Intelligence (BI) discusses the fact that business intelligence is probably the number one priority for CIOs, but most companies have not translated that prioritization into high value.

That conclusion doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been arguing for sometime that most businesses under-utilize their data assets. Here are a couple of blog posts, looking at topics like BI as an oxymoron, technology and culture, and the key drivers of Best-in-Class manufacturing.

In this latest story, I especially like this prescription for addressing the problem:

IT workers must reconsider how they deliver information to end users. Traditionally, on one end of the spectrum, users either access information through static reports or through ad hoc queries, Schlegel said. Instead, IT should focus on developing interactive reports to meet both demands.

On the other end of the spectrum, more sophisticated users often create their own spreadmarts, which by definition fall outside the view of IT, to make up for the limitations of ad hoc queries. IT departments should develop data discovery environments that empower users to do the analysis they need, but which also let them connect that analysis back to the organization.

That sounds to me like a dashboard that users can drill into to get to the underlying data. It sounds to me like an analysis wizard that guides users to the underlying sources of variation in a process.

IT people do sometimes lose sight of their real goal. As one conference attendee, Chad Erman, head of BI for Southwestern Energy put it, “We noticed a lot of people think in terms of reports, instead of BI or key metrics. What I constantly had to remind them … is: What is the question you’re trying to answer? Then work to achieve that goal.”

Getting business leaders the right tools can go a long way to enabling that shift.

What about you? Are you getting high value from BI? If not, what are your road blocks? You can leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

A couple years ago we sponsored a research report by the Aberdeen Group on best practices in Six Sigma deployments. You can download a copy of the report, and a companion white paper that I wrote for the report called “Leveraging Technology to Transform Culture.” For me the most astonishing thing about that 2006 report was the disconnect between the challenges people say they face in their Six Sigma deployments and their responses to those challenges.

Most of the challenges people face are cultural:

Most people respond to those challenges directly by doing a checklist of initiatives: train employees, introduce change gradually, assign senior management as champions, engage outside consultants, steal talent from the competition, and so forth.

This frontal assault has been going on for years and it isn’t working. That’s the forehead smacking part of this.

Years ago I realized that making data more visible and accessible changed the way people look at themselves, the people around them, and the problems they face. Somehow just making the data visible takes away the personality and political dimensions – the cultural barriers – and helps people focus on solving problems.

Making the data very accessible – visually on the screen in a control chart or a dashboard – and making it available in real-time is a huge benefit. It breaks down all kinds of barriers.

My customer, Royce Binion, then Director of Operations at BAE Systems Controls in Fort Wayne, put it most succinctly when he said to me years ago “Real-time access to accurate, actionable data is the number one tool that has enabled us to move to a data driven culture.” This was way back in 2000 when his plant won the Industry Week’s 10 Best Plants award, and a few years before they would win the Shingo Prize.

This came up again for me this week when I attended a webinar hosted by the Aberdeen Group. They’re doing follow up research to see what has changed in the last 2 1/2 years, and they wanted to share their preliminary findings on best practices in Lean Six Sigma deployments. (If you’d like to participate in the study, you have until April 30. You get a free copy of the report if you do.)

What struck me as I heard this briefing is how little has changed. Cultural challenges are still at the top of the list, followed closely by IT and technology challenges. People still don’t seem to be connecting the dots.

Today I wrote to Cindy Jutras, the author of this research, to get her take on it. She wrote back:

in spite of all the data and IT related challenges from the previous slide (about the challenges people face in Lean Six Sigma deployments), there was not an appropriate response to those challenges. I agree that visibility is key. And our results support that. In general we found those with True Six Sigma have 110% better visibility than Industry Average and 580% better visibility than Laggards. Not surprisingly, they deploy far more IT tools than those not performing as well.

How about you? Are you using real-time access to accurate, actionable data to transform your culture? You can leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

I love this post from Thomas Wailgum at CIO.COM. His title says it all: “Wake Up People! Forget Twitter and iPhone Apps, and Focus on SAP and ERP Apps.”

I’ve been on Twitter now for several months and I confess that I find it addicting. I still can’t decide if it is irrelevant or useful.

Wailgum argues that:

They are nothing more than a costly distraction, stealing your attention from the massive problems that you, your company and the business world now face: We’re in a deep recession (perhaps a depression), and your company’s core IT systems are going to be called on to do more and more (with less and less).

If you’re a Twitter fan, you’re likely to bristle at this argument.

I’ve certainly had fun following people on Twitter, and I’ve even made some connections and learned some things that I wouldn’t otherwise know. But it doesn’t drive my business. In fact, I think Wailgum hit the nail on the head: Business enterprise software will drive value in your business, not Twitter or Facebook.

Recently we sponsored a research study by the Aberdeen Group.  The report looks at specific practices and technologies that manufacturers have in place, and look at the productivity and profitability of those businesses. Here is a key finding from this research that supports Wailgum’s argument:

This is the first benchmark produced by the manufacturing practice (Aberdeen Group Research analysts) showing a direct correlation between Best-in-Class operational performance across On Time Delivery, OEE and Yield metrics that enables significantly higher profitability. In fact, the Best-in-Class enjoy over 33% higher operating margins than both Industry Average and Laggards.

So what is it that Best-in-Class performers do that generates a 33% higher margin than Average or Laggards? What behaviors drive this kind of performance benefit?

A glance at the top four or five high impact differentiators between Average and Best-in-Class performers reveal a common theme: real-time data. Here are the top differentiators of Best-in-Class performance in manufacturing companies:

• Continuous Improvement Teams leverage analytics and real-time visibility into operations
• Production release and control leverages real-time data
• Production optimization uses real-time data from production processes and responds to process deviations
• Plant floor exceptions are monitored in real-time

Twitter isn’t on the list. Neither is Facebook.

Nothing on this list is very sexy or even new. Nothing is based on derivatives. It is all the fundamental block and tackle stuff that actually makes a difference to the bottom line. A 33% difference in the bottom line.

If you want to read more, please download the Event Driven Manufacturing Intelligence Report and my companion white paper, “The Role of Real-Time Data in Improving Profitability and Customer Satisfaction.”

Then tell me whether you think Twitter and Facebook are irrelevant. You can leave a comment, tweet me (ironic isn’t it?), schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

Now I need to tweet about this new post!