The Data Heads

Last week I had a few minutes to sit down with Chris Bowman, one of our senior implementation specialists, to talk about a project that he had just completed for a foods company in upstate New York. I was really impressed with the story he told me.

If you’ve ever wondered what you can do to help your staff remember when it is time to collect data, you’ll want to keep reading.

This question about making sure that people collect data seems to be a hot topic. And it makes sense because there are two opposing forces at work. First you need data from your staff. You can’t make decisions based on data if your people don’t collect the data. But working against you (and them) is the fact that everyone is already busy. Even well-intentioned people will often only oil the squeaky wheel.

(Of course if you need data, and everyone is too busy, the best solution might be to automate the whole process. But for a variety of reasons automation may not be possible or desirable. We’re talking here about those situations.)

Chris’s solution makes sure that your data wheel squeaks. His solution is very slick and may set the new standard for how customers ensure data are collected in a timely manner.

A little background…

This customer has several checks they want to take periodically, many at different intervals. They want make that as easy as possible.  As Chris put it, “The customer is trying to make it easy to enter multiple sets of data  without having to exit this planned session and launch that planned session, or exit this planned session and launch that planned session.”

And it gets even more interesting. “They’re going to enter the same data over and over again,” Chris said. “But periodically they need to change traceability values, change products and what not, I don’t want to ask them every single time.

At the core of the solution is what Chris calls the “Control Center.” Here is a picture of it:

So what is going on here?

The most important thing is in the left hand window, the one with the green and red blocks. A red block means that a check is overdue. This window is automatically refreshed every few minutes. A green block means that check isn’t due yet. In this example, the Weight, Process and Line checks are all overdue.

Once one of the checks goes red, all the user has to do is click on the Next Action button (in the upper right corner) and select that check from a list. The Control Center launches the check, passing along all the traceability information along.

Of course one of the Next Actions the user can select is to change traceability, or to select a new product.

This customer also wanted to display live control charts for the two most important checks at the same time. They could display any GainSeeker chart or dashboard they wanted, and of course they could display any number of charts on the screen too.

What do you think? Would your organization benefit from the Control Center idea? Would you like more technical information? Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

One thing I like about blogging is that you can call something by its real name. Last month my business partner and our Alpha Geek, Byron Shetler, attended the OPC Foundation’s Interoperability Conference 2010. When we refer to it in our press release, that’s what we call it.

But in this blog I can call it what it really was: a Geek Fest.

What is a Geek Fest, you ask? Maybe a picture is worth a thousand words:

If you look carefully, you’ll see Byron all the way down on the right side of the table. He is the guy leaning forward in a white polo shirt.

Click on the picture to open it in another window. Then click on it again to blow it up to full size.

What I love about this picture is the story that the tangle of network cables and power strips and half-empty coffee cups tells. Two tables. Maybe 45 people. Ear buds jammed in ears cranking out tunes. (Bonus point if you can name who that is. Double bonus if you can guess the tune.) Hands on foreheads in deep thought. All crammed in a conference room with enough computing power to launch a rocket.

And just in case you were wondering – it is all guys.

So why did we go to this particular Geek Fest, and what did we accomplish?

OPC is an open connectivity standard that defines how shop floor equipment and manufacturing software communicate with each other. Think of how printer drivers make it possible for all the software on your computer to communicate with your printer. OPC does the same thing for shop floor controls and equipment.

We developed the OPC interface to GainSeeker Suite a few years ago, and wrote up a nice case study about how the GainSeeker OPC interface was so easy to deploy and saved a customer a lot of money.

At the time, we tested the interface with two of the most important vendors of OPC drivers (Kepware and Matrikon). We used them because they provide stand-alone demo systems. We needed the demo system because we can’t implement a full-fledged factory information system. After all, we don’t have a factory. And as our customers have implemented the solution we’ve verified that it works with GE Fanuc, Rockwell Automation, and several others.

Recently, the OPC Foundation has been pushing hard for vendors to test their systems at an interoperability workshop. The workshop runs for a full week. It isn’t a trivial commitment.

(As a side note, I have to mention that before the Foundation started pushing interoperability testing, several of our direct competitors were members of the OPC Foundation. Last time I checked, they had all dropped off the list. Now if you search for “SPC” on the Foundation website, we’re the only fully-featured SPC system vendor listed. Everyone else has an all-encompassing factory management system that happens to include a control chart somewhere in their product.)

These workshops bring vendors together from all around the world so that you can really test the interoperability of your system in all kinds of conditions. At the workshop, Byron was able to test the interface with software from these vendors:

• Yokogawa Electric Corp.
• Takebishi Corp.
• Software Toolbox
• Siemens AG
• OSISoft, Inc.
• MSIndustrie Software GmbH
• MatrikonOPC
• Kepware Technologies
• InduSoft LLC
• GE Intelligent Platforms
• Emerson Process Management

We weren’t surprised that the testing went smoothly. But it was great to conduct so many tests at one time. Byron says he built a database of OPC servers and tags, and then wrote a template in GainSeeker Suite that let him select a server and put it through its paces. Once he had the infrastructure set up, he could conduct a new test in a matter of minutes.

And as Byron put it: “Our testing addressed all of the functionality that we need to support our customers. It was cool to get all these companies in one room, bang on each other’s software, and prove that everything works as advertised.”

Did you get that? “It was cool to bang on each other’s software.”

That’s what I call a Geek Fest!

If you’re not looking for a Geek Fest, but you are looking for an easy way to get to process data, OPC may be the way to go. Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

Over the last few days we’ve posted information about an upcoming User Conference on our Events page and our Press Release pages.  Because this is a joint Hertzler User Group and Minitab User Group, I wondered briefly if we should call it a MUG HUG.  Too cheesy. (Detailed information and Registration here.)

Here is some more background.

I’m really looking forward to the conference for several reasons.

First, I’m pleased that two old friends will be giving presentations. Wayne Tollefsen (Omron Automotive) and Jamie Dobravec (Grayhill Inc.) have both been customers for years, and they always have interesting, real-world perspectives. I always learn something when I talk to them. This is the first time (I think) that I’ve heard either of them give formal talks.  They’re definitely worth hearing.

Second, I’m looking forward to sharing something about the learning path that I’ve been on in the last eight or ten months on Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry (Ai) is an exciting organizational change model that is based on the idea that organizations move in the direction of the questions that they ask. It is rich in philosophy and research, and has a well-developed methodology for application. In addition to describing my personal journey in Ai, I’m eager to explore the possibilities of learning together about the best practices for aligning strategy, culture, and tools to achieve optimal results.

Third, we spent the last year hard at work on the GainSeeker Suite Version 8.  We released Version 8 a couple months ago, and my business partner and Hertzler’s Alpha Geek, Byron Shetler, is going to share his perspectives on the new release.  If you’ve heard Byron speak before, you know you’re in for a treat. His insights and ability to bridge technology and the way people work are unique, and for a guy who claims to be uncomfortable up in front of an audience, he is a great communicator.

Finally, I’m looking forward to learning more about what our customers want from the integration between GainSeeker and Minitab. We formed a loose alliance with Minitab over 10 years ago because we didn’t want to get into the advanced statistics side of things, and Minitab is the most important app in that arena. We see the combination of GainSeeker and Minitab as far “more than the sum of parts.” Jay Bronec, whose company, QualiFine, is hosting this users conference, has been a strong voice for that synergy. Here is how Jay describes it:

“Back in 2000 I sponsored a conference highlighting the integration of GainSeeker Real-Time SPC with Minitab.  At the time it was clear to me that integrating these two systems increased the value of both tremendously.  A decade later this innovative approach still ranks at the top of my list of best-kept secrets to thriving in manufacturing. To get full value out of Minitab, a manufacturer needs to implement a real-time data automation solution like GainSeeker. I tell my customers to think of it like this, ‘If your best talent is too busy collecting, scrubbing and creating pivot tables to extract basic reports from Minitab, there’s little to no time left for making sense of the data. You’re reacting, not leading. In the current business environment, real-time data are essential for success.’”

Putting Jay, customers of both Minitab and GainSeeker, as well as people from Minitab and Hertzler Systems in the same room on the same day is a great opportunity to learn. I can’t predict what will come out of it, but it will be good.

Those are my top reasons for attending. What about you? Are you coming? What do you hope to gain? Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

Yesterday my colleague Chris called me. “I just had a really interesting call from Bob,” he said. (Bob isn’t his real name. “Bob” is a customer who doesn’t want me to divulge his or his company’s name.) Bob’s company makes  packages filled with something that you can find in most grocery stores. They make a lot of these packages.

In one of my last conversations with Bob he told me “I’m almost embarrassed to tell you how much money GainSeeker is saving us by helping us reduce over pack (give away). The ROI on our deployment is shocking.”

We love it when we hear these stories – even if Bob won’t let me do a full-blown write up with all the gory details.

But Bob’s call to Chris raised an interesting question. Chris told me that Bob said he now believes they’ve been under-reporting the payback on his GainSeeker deployment. After six months or eight months of reducing over pack, Bob is discovering that his plant has made significant increases in yield.

He had been counting the savings realized by not giving away the product, but he wasn’t thinking about where the product he had been giving away was going.

It seems to me that the answer to this question hinges on whether the major constraint to his system is plant capacity, or demand for the product. If demand for the product is unlimited (we could sell every package we make) then any reduction in over pack goes into new packages and brand new sales. That is like picking up free money off the floor.

On the other hand, if the constraint on the system is capacity for production, then any reduction in over pack reduces the total cost of filling the package. If you have an order for 1000 packages and you can produce them in 7 hours instead of 8 hours, then you save one hour’s cost (energy, labor, etc.) and use less materials.

This reminds me of a chapter out of Goldratt’s The Goal. Do you remember when Jonah walks through the plant with the hero Alex and his team and discusses bottlenecks? They get to the heat treat area and the consensus among the team is that the parts waiting in the queue (WIP) are worth only a few thousand dollars. Jonah helps them realize that in reality those parts represent over a million dollars of revenue stuck in WIP. (p155-156)

I think Bob’s controller will have to weigh in on the final answer. What is clear to me is that Bob was delighted with GainSeeker Suite’s power to collect and analyze data so he could reduce material  costs and increase yields.

After I wrote most of this I had a chance to talk directly with Bob, and I learned a little more. He produces to order, not to stock, so improving yield does not lead directly to new sales. Improving yield means that he can produce the same output at lower costs. If the cost of over pack already includes all his overhead costs (energy, labor, materials) then I think it would be double-dipping to count increased sales. However, at some point it does seem that increased capacity would result in increased sales. He told me that last year he had the place open half the Saturdays of the year to meet demand. Now they’ve eliminated overtime and increased volume. Can he get his accounting people to recognize this? We’ll see.

What do you think? How are you tracking the ROI on your data efforts? How might GainSeeker help you? Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

Quality Magazine picked up my blog post on the Voice of the Process loop. I’m really interested in your comments on the questions posed in the post, either at the Quality Mag site, or here.

For the last 18 months we’ve been working on the latest release of GainSeeker Suite, Version 8. We released it last week and you can read all about it here.

I can’t decide which is the coolest feature in the release: the new Dynamic Reports module or .Launch.

In beta testing, Dynamic Reports has proven to be very powerful and very cool.  Every time somebody has come up with a request for some special report I think “No way. That’s just too much to hope for…”

Then someone digs into it a little bit and the next thing I know we have a working solution that goes beyond my wildest imagination. I’ll be publishing a case study in the next few days to show you what I mean.

But .Launch (“dot launch”) … what a little sweetheart of an application. There aren’t any fancy stats or charts, and it doesn’t integrate with your ERP system. But it puts a really nice UI on all the command line parameters that our geeks have built into system that nobody has time to figure out. If you want to launch a specific desktop in Charts & Reports, with a specific user name (and not have to type in the password everytime), .Launch can take care of it. Plus you can launch any other application on your system and organize all of them in Groups.

I’ll be using .Launch to organize presentations. In my world, I’m often flipping between a PowerPoint slide show (maybe two or three different files), and Excel spreadsheet, and several GainSeeker Suite modules. .Launch gives me a single place to drop all those shortcuts. It significantly unclutters my desktop.

So for raw power, I vote for Dynamic Reports. But for the module that I’ll be using on a daily basis to make life more convenient, it’s .Launch all the way.

We put together a micro-site on GainSeeker Suite V8. Take a look and let us know which features you’re most happy to see added. Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

One of the really important aspects of the Data Cost / Value Matrix is how reducing the cost of data can help you get more value from data.

This came up again the other day as we were debriefing following a recent deployment for a new customer. This customer is about to undergo a major cultural transformation because we helped them automate real-time data collection and analysis. In the process, they will shift from a Product Control to a Process Control way of looking at the world. Ultimately this will reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, and (we hope) drive new business.

This customer makes electronic devices. Their products are complex pieces of equipment, and at a couple places on the production line, the various component parts and the final assembly pass through an automated test stand. This test stand runs the unit though dozens – even hundreds of electrical tests. A unit has to pass all of those tests to be released to their customer.

Sounds like a winner, right? One hundred percent inspection. Nothing bad ever escapes to the end user. And we have the data to prove it. Boy, do we have data. Entire databases of rows and columns of numbers. Every one of them in spec.

Except it doesn’t work that way. Some units pass all the tests with flying colors – and then fail out of the box or early in the life of the product. Here is what the data for one test parameter looks like plotted on a histogram (this isn’t actually the customer’s data – it’s just representative):

In this example, everything is well within spec – it should all be good.

When you look at this data in time series on a control chart it looks very different:

Viewed this way, this data tells a completely different story. If you look closely you can see a couple of signals that the process is unstable, even though everything meets spec. In a complex environment with dozens of critical – and interconnected – variables, these unstable values often directly correlate to the early life and out of the box failures.

Learning to rely on the control chart is the shift from Product Control to Process Control. It is often a tough shift to make – especially when everything is in spec.

What makes it even harder, however, is the sheer volume of data they need to sift through to find those signals. Hundreds of test parameters, hundreds of units tested every day. Automation is the only way you can keep up with the data. By automating the data collection and analysis process you can empower people to make that cultural change.

What about you? How can reducing data costs make it easier to get more value from your data? Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, or leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

I’m tickled that The Elkhart Truth picked up our story about our tree planting project today. With Arbor Day coming up this Friday they devoted part of a page to local efforts to support trees, and our story was the lead.

When I announced the tree project in this space, I mentioned that I would come back later and share another baby step we’re taking to reduce our carbon footprint. Compared to all those trees, this one seemed small – almost trivial. But then I ran the numbers and it turns out that this one small step cut our electrical consumption by 16%. All of a sudden it didn’t seem so trivial after all.

Back in early February I started writing down the reading on our electrical meter every morning when I got to work. I subtracted the prior day’s reading to get the amount (in Kilowatt Hours) that we used the prior day.  If I missed a day (or the weekend), I just took the difference and divided it by the number of days to get the average rate for the period.

After about a month I pasted the data into GainSeeker Suite SPC Software and came up with this chart:

I also calculated the average daily cost and sent out this memo to my staff:

Here is the challenge: Lets pay attention to your own personal habits and see what we can do to chip away at our electrical consumption. Here are a couple of things you can do:

• Turn off monitors and desktop pcs on evenings and weekends.
• Minimize use of space heaters.
• Unplug any chargers or DC devices that aren’t actually charging anything. (An AC/DC charger consumes power if it is plugged in and not charging anything.)

You may have other ideas. Please try them out.

There are certain computers (like our servers) that need to be up all the time. But lets see what we can do if we try these minimal steps.

I’ll take the difference between now and sometime towards the end of April and buy lunch with the money we don’t give to the utility company. If it is a dollar a day it will be pizza. If it is more, well it will be nicer.

Then we continued monitoring the meter every day. Here are the before and after results on one chart. The Anchor Point (the vertical red line in the center) marks the day the email went out, and the shift in our process.

According to GainSeeker stats, the average daily consumption dropped from 1.9KWH to 1.6KWH. This is a 16% reduction – achieved by something as simple as turning off equipment that isn’t being used!

We had a nice party!

Why is this important? Here are some statistics about my home state, Indiana, of which I am less than proud:

• Indiana produces about 95% of its electricity in coal-burning generating plants.
• Indiana ranks 5th in the nation as the largest producer of carbon dioxide air emissions from electric power plants in the United States (122,094,588 metric tons).
• Indiana ranks 3rd in the nation in terms of the number of metric tons of sulfur dioxide air emissions (responsible for fine particle pollution and acid rain).
• Indiana ranks 4th in terms of the number of metric tons of toxic nitrogen oxides emitted into the atmosphere (responsible for acid rain and smog).
• Indiana ranks 1st in the nation for the amount of carbon dioxide emissions per person from all Indiana energy sectors.

All of this reminds me of the quote that was attributed to Pogo, the famous possum: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

So what are you waiting on? Turn off or pull the plug on stuff you’re not using. Its a great place to start.

And while I’m thinking of it, maybe Electrical Consumption needs to be on our list of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

What are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint? You can leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

Here is a chance to participate in Hertzler Systems’ development effort.

Sometime in the next few months we’ll be releasing Version 8 of the GainSeeker® Suite. One important capability in this new version is a brand new report writer. I saw a sneak preview of it the other day, and my jaw dropped open several times when I saw what it could do.

Sample Design Screen for GainSeeker Version 8 Report Writer

Our development team is looking for sample reports to test the new report writer with “real data”.

We invite you to submit any sample reports that you have. These might be Certificate of Analysis or other report that you use on a regular basis. You can send in your report whether you’re already a GainSeeker user or not.

Sample Report for GainSeeker Version 8 Report Writer

To submit your sample, send it electronically to [suggest at hertzler dot com], or fax it to 574-533-3885. In either case, make sure you include your contact information so we can respond to you personally.