The Data Heads

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.

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.

Several years ago I started practicing what I preach, at least when it comes to making better use of data in my business. What did I do that was so radical? I started using control charts to track my key business metrics. Imagine that!

We set up a simple data entry process that my controller uses. It takes him a few seconds once a month to key in a few numbers at month end, and again every other week after cutting payroll and payables. And there is another set of numbers that we automatically extract from our call center system.

My key metrics are around revenue from a couple of sources, expenses in a couple of key, controllable categories, cash, profitability, and the number of open support calls. It isn’t perfect, but it gives me a view into the business that I would not want to live without.

Sample KPI Desktop from GainSeeker Suite

I really like the control chart format. It is such a knowledge-rich way to look at data. I know there are people who claim they can look a column of numbers and understand them. When I do that, my brain goes numb. But I find the graphic representation of data on a run chart very easy to follow. In a glance I can see the history and any statistically significant shifts in the process. I can also group data by time period so it is easy to compare quarter to quarter, or year to year.

I implemented this long before we introduced a dashboard module for the GainSeeker Suite.  I’ll get in trouble for admitting that in spite of all those cool dashboards, I still prefer the control charts.

How do you look at KPIs? What are the KPIs that matter in your job and your business? Comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call us at 800-958-2709.

For the last couple weeks we’ve been working on an OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) project for a new client. When I sat down over lunch today with our CTO and Alpha Geek, Byron Shetler, he explained that the biggest issue - as usual - is getting the data. “This company doesn’t have an OPC/PLC network in place yet, so everything we did last week was around manual data entry.

“I set up a couple of GainSeeker templates to collect downtime, scrap, and efficiency, and we’re storing that as either variable or defect data every hour on every machine.” Byron pointed out that once this customer puts his OPC factory network in place we’ll automate the data collection piece.

By the end of the day Friday (after less than a week on site) Byron had a couple of dashboards in place. He couldn’t bring back any screen caps of their dashboard, but it sounds a lot like what you’ll see on the Dashboard page on our website.

GainSeeker Enterprise Dashboard - OEE Example

Byron reported that the customer was pretty happy that we got in and out so quickly. But more important, he’s excited about getting an hourly update on OEE, Quality, Downtime and Efficiency, and being able drill into any of those metrics by machine or operator or downtime reason, or scrap reason.

Byron reported: “This customer is pretty sharp, and he was practically rubbing his hands together in anticipation of getting his hands on that data. Being able to see the big picture and then drill into various components to understand the root cause is a huge opportunity for this company.”

In addition to linking to the OPC network, once it is in place, Byron also sees potential to feed data back from GainSeeker to the customer’s AS400 business system. “Right now the customer has a couple people who sit down and type data from paper records for scrap and production rates back into the primary business sytem.