Digital Transformation At the Manufacturing Plant

“In God we trust, all others must bring data.” – W. Edwards Deming.

This phrase, which is related to Edwards Deming, is saying it all in nine words.

Structured data collection, analytics and predictions are mandatory today to successfully manage the manufacturing plant and to stay competitive.

Unstructured data that is processed via emails, chat, phone-calls, excel's, etc, is not transparent to the organization, data is not being collected over time, not analyzed for anomalies and root cause detection. Studies show that up to 60% of business data is processed in unstructured way's. This is a wasted asset and there is a ״gold mine״ to explore for the organisational streamlining.

The importance of structured data collection is already clear to everyone. The concern of managers is the lack of employees' will to cooperate and collect the data. But managers and employees need to realize that this is a "must do" in order to keep the business alive. Employees need to know that structured data collection is part of the task and without it, the task is incomplete!

When I started my professional carrier as a programmer, we developed a system for the medical service provider that Doctors will be able to document patient's visits and prognosis (1990's). When we introduced the system to the doctors, they laughed, saying there is no way they will key in data into a machine. They insisted on writing notes in unreadable hand writing and handing it to the nurse who should update the machine. Well, today, you will not find a single doctor that is not updating the patient files by himself. Doing that enables to conduct wide scale research, A/B testings and obviously keeping accurate data collection of patients's records.

Similar to that evolution, it is with manufacturing plant, it is not anymore a nice to have feature to consider in the future, it is mandatory and of essence for the factory to conduct the digital transformation now!

The difference of today vs some 5 years ago, digital transformation tools and analytics were expensive to deploy and only large and financial sound enterprises could afford to deploy such systems, today, there are many applications and ecosystem built on the cloud that enables a very cost effective with insignificant entry barrier for medium and small companies to do the transformation, check out Briefery for one!

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