The Data Heads

At today’s web seminar How Best-in-Class Food Processing Companies Drive Profits, Increase Efficiency and Reduce Risk, my colleague Tom Albrecht offered a number of free resources for individuals who would like more information. (If you missed the live presentation, you can still view the recorded version.) We decided to put links to all of these resources on one page so that you can use this as a starting point.

Here are the resources:

• The Aberdeen Group’s Event Driven Manufacturing Intelligence Benchmark Report.
• A supporting white paper that examines the role of real-time data in improving profitability and customer satisfaction.
• The Aberdeen Group’s Cost of Quality Benchmark Report.
• Free gap analysis software that helps you rate your ‘Gap to Entitlement‘ to a data driven organization
• Case Studies and video presentations from McCormick Flavor Division, Hormel Foods, Consolidated Biscuit, and Del Monte Foods. Additional case studies and white papers are available from the Portfolio pages on our website.

Of course, if you’d like to link to this, share it with a friend or make a comments, please do so. Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

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.

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!

One of the discussion forums I try to monitor is Elsmar Cove. Sometimes it goes pretty geeky (I’m sorry, its just the word that comes to mind.) But sometimes it has some great questions. Here is one from that ‘Shesha’ posted today.

Hi,

Just wanted to know, what are the different methods you all had used OR are using to improve the Quality Culture in a organisation , mean to say to change the mindset of the people in a organisation towards implementation of process and Quality related stuff.

Thanks & Rgds, Shesha

I had to post the following response:

My experience is that when you want to change culture you have to provide the tools to make it so. Everyone talks about getting commitment from the top, and of course all that is true. But if that commitment is shown by table thumping and speeches and bands and banners it is a bunch of hogwash. (Pun intended - in reference to an earlier comment about how committed chickens and pigs are to preparing the farmer’s breakfast.)

If you want a quality culture that is data driven (which is what many people mean when they say they want a quality culture) the most important tool is the right data, in the right form, and right now.

Actually, this isn’t just my experience. The Aberdeen Group has published a couple research reports that put some dollars behind this. Best-in-class performers pay attention to building real-time data systems. Failing to do so undermines culture. And culture eats strategy for lunch.

You can download this and some supporting white papers from my website.

Four reports are especially on topic:

Aberdeen Event Driven Manufacturing Intelligence Report

The Role of Real-Time Data in Improving Profitability and Customer Satisfaction

Aberdeen Lean Six Sigma Benchmark Report

Leveraging Technology to Transform Culture

One of my staff members calls this “Evan’s Soapbox” and it is true.

A recent study by the Aberdeen Group found that Best-in-Class manufacturers substantially out-perform laggards.

Duh… Of course Best-in-Class have higher yields, throughput, and profits, and are more likely to deliver product on time. Here are the stats:

What we wanted to know is why. Why do Best-in-Class performers enjoy profits that are 25% higher than Laggards? What do they do that is different? How do they get those kinds of significant differences?

The Aberdeen Report, available here, gives a good start to answering these questions.

As a Data Head, I wasn’t entirely satisfied until I had sliced and diced the data myself. Specifically I needed to see the relative importance of the various components of good performance. What I found surprised me and opened new layers of meaning to the Aberdeen Research.

Based on this add-on research, I wrote a companion White Paper that I hope you’ll download and read: “The Role of Real-Time Data in Improving Profits and Customer Satisfaction“.

Take a look at both of these reports. Then share your comments: how do these findings fit with your experience?

I’ve been following Forrest Breyfogle for some time. You may know that he came out with a couple of the definitive text books for the Six Sigma DMAIC process several years ago. I have a couple of them on my shelf.

In the last few months, I’ve bumped into Breyfogle at a couple of conferences and he is onto something really important. At the risk of oversimplifying it, he has come to realize that Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma are, in and of themselves, too narrow in scope. All too often DMAIC projects fix one thing and break something else, and seldom do you find links from individual projects to ultimate business performance.

This is made worse because these process improvement efforts are mostly divorced from the implementation of business dashboards and scorecards. Furthermore, strategic goals are too often created in a vacuum at an executive retreat with little connection to customers and their real needs. (Six Sigma guru’s may be harrumphing in the background, but please, go read his website. There’s a lot of truth in his words.)

Breyfogle proposes an Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system that helps organizations execute the Three ‘Rs’ of Business: Doing the Right Things, doing them Right, at the Right Time. You can read more about IEE at his website and blog.

You find IT (information technology) and the CIO (Chief Information Officer) at the heart of IEE. Breyfogle “gets” the role of the CIO and IT in continuous improvement. He has a great white paper on this topic, and his latest blog post touches on it.

I haven’t had time to see how far Breyfogle takes his prescription for what IT needs to do to enable business excellence. What I’ve read so far seems very consistent with our customer’s experiences and my vision for how data and IT can - in Breyfogle’s words - “be the catalyst for new improvement initiatives.” It is also consistent with the research we’ve seen out of the Aberdeen Group on the role of real-time data in manufacturing excellence.

Breyfogle thinks he may be on to the “Next Big Thing”, and he may be right. I intend to keep my eye on it.

I’m attending the Aberdeen Manufacturing Executive Summit today and tomorrow. The speakers have been great, but I’m intrigued by the live surveys that they’re running between speakers. This morning they asked two questions back-to-back and the results shocked me.

The first question was “How is the macro-economic picture affecting your budget?” I wasn’t surprised to see that only 9% of the people at the conference were forecasting increased budgets. The rest expected no change (31%), Frozen (14%) or Decrease (34%). (I’m afraid I’m not sure about the difference between No Change and Frozen.)

The second question was the one that jarred me: “How is the macro-economic climate affecting your growth strategy?” The results were a complete flip-flop. (Well the survey is being held on election day.)

Sixty-eight percent planned expansion, while only 6% planned contraction. The balance (26%) are staying the course.

Grow your business with fewer resources.

Do more with less!

What is clear from our experience, and is now supported by research from the Aberdeen Group, is that one of the best ways to do more with less is to empower your people with ready access to accurate, actionable, real-time data.

You can download a free copy of the Aberdeen Report on Event Driven Manufacturing Intelligence, along with our companion white paper on the Role of Real-time Data in Improving Profitability and Customer Satisfaction from the Portfolio section our website.

Real-time data helps you respond to problems faster and reduce material costs and scrap and rework costs, and it frees staff for more productive work.

That’s doing more with less.