Recently I had a conversation with a client about his experience using another SPC software system.
“It was so frustrating,” he said. “To really get to the data I needed, I had to extract it from several files into a big spreadsheet. It literally took two days to find the data, export it, and then combine it into a format that I could use. It was a huge drain of my time.”
Anytime my client needed to drill into a problem, he was staring into a one or two-day data extraction and scrubbing project. With all the other pressures bearing down on him, he didn’t have two-day blocks he could readily give up. It wasn’t that he was lazy, afraid of hard work, or incapable or incompetent. He is highly competent and very bright. And that was the root of his frustration. He knew what to do, but he just had too much on his plate to be able to execute effectively.
Stuck in reaction mode
The result was that it took a rare or extraordinary problem to trigger an investigation. Often problems didn’t surface until it was way too late to do anything about them. Or if they did surface in time, data system challenges meant problem solving was always late and rarely effective. The organization was stuck in reaction mode. Problems were patched; they didn’t go away.
GainSeeker SPC Software – Faster Response
The contrast between that experience and his experience of GainSeeker Suite SPC software was astonishing. “In GainSeeker, all the data is already in one place. In a few minutes I can get the data that I need and it’s in a format that I can use.”
At first, it’s tempting to view this as a story about saving time. Going from “a day or two” to a few minutes is incredible – almost unbelievable. The return on that investment is phenomenal. Who wouldn’t want to shrink the time it takes to do something from two days to a few minutes? And you can stop doing the mind-numbing data extraction and data massaging work and really focus on solving problems.
But this “saving time” view is a false argument. Pause for a second and think about it.
Here is the key: “It took a rare or extraordinary problem to trigger an investigation.”
The benefit isn’t the time my client saved in extracting data because he didn’t do it that often. You can’t save time no longer doing something that you never did in the first place.
So why was my client so excited about using GainSeeker? It has to do with time.
Cycle Time, not Saving Time
It wasn’t his personal time that he saved. It was the faster cycle time between finding a problem and solving the problem. It was Cycle Time.
Faster cycle times when problems crop up means that you produce a lot less bad product before the problem is fixed. This reduces scrap and rework. Productivity and throughput go up. Ready access to actionable data keeps everyone more focused on the job at hand: getting product out the door.
If you’d like to discuss how Hertzler can help you solve problems faster and reduce costs and improve throughput, please contact me at 800-958-2709, or at LinkedIn or Twitter.
