Corporate had mandated that they get this information out to the workforce, and they were manually updating white boards with markers at the end of each shift. It was a time consuming, error-ridden process. Here is a picture we took from inside the plant showing the shop floor data collection station, with the large flat panel display suspended from the ceiling. . . .
There is an old story about Dr. W. Edwards Deming from back in the mid 1980s when he was working with the big three auto There There is an old story about Dr. W. Edwards Deming from back in the mid 1980s when he was working with the big three auto companies. I don't know if it is true, but the story goes that someone asked him: "Dr. Deming - fifty years from now, which companies will still be practicing your 14 points?" He was reported to have growled: ...
As I talk to people in many different businesses, I'm often amazed at how much time they spend extracting, massaging, and scrubbing data for analysis and reporting. I call this "The Data Shuffle". A friend of mine at Minitab calls it "The stuff we do that we call our job." My informal surveys of Six [...]
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 [...]
A couple weeks ago I published an audio interview with Jay Bronec about his 'Ah-Ha' Moment when he realized that he was spending valuable company time doing non-value-added work. In that interview he described how he is automating his company's KPIs by integrating our CRM and Web data using GainSeeker. Today I followed up with [...]
Recently Larry Coburn, the Sr. VP of Operations at Crown Audio, gave a presentation at the Aberdeen Manufacturing Excellence Summit. We recorded his talk, and you can watch it online. I really enjoyed Larry's talk because he doesn't pull any punches. He understands how manufacturing drives the economy, and he has a powerful antidote to [...]
In my last post I described an interesting conversation with a customer about his company's pilot deployment of GainSeeker Suite. You may recall that because of staff turnover, this plant was collecting data but not doing anything with it. The company was feeling pressure from a significant increase in raw material costs, and because nobody [...]
"As we talked it became clear that material costs were going through the roof, and the company needed to find ways to control and reduce those costs. .. Eventually we went back to the QM's office and her computer where we spent about 10 minutes digging into the data that they were already collecting. We used GainSeeker's Analysis Wizard to find underlying causes. What I found surprised all three of us. . . . "
Data is a wild river that holds some great fish that you can eat, but essentially it is blocking you from your next destination. . . . If you're an Act II Settler, that same data river is something that can help drive subsequent cycles of the DMAIC process. In Settler terms you can use it to water your crops, drive a new sawmill, and (once you've invented them) power electric lights and a toaster. . .
This morning I opened my weekly update from LinkedIn and saw the following note: Jay Bronec is working on automating QualiFine's KPIs by integrating our CRM and Web data using GainSeeker. I fired off an email and asked Jay to fill me in. He called my a few minutes later from his car. In the [...]
