Marginal Cost of Curiosity

Years ago, as a young engineer working for one of my early mentors in manufacturing, we were experiencing production results that were continually below targets. We would look at the monthly production reports, sales forecasts and shipping details to try to understand why we were under goal again - and we would make some corrections going into the next month. But each month, the story was different - something else had gone wrong and all the corrective action we had taken seemed to have had no effect.

Earl, head of manufacturing, said he needed information from manufacturing sooner and more frequently than once a month. So he set up a team of people to go out onto the floor every two hours and gather a handful of parameters; some about production, some about quality, some about inventory and production kits.

We would compile this information, and four times a day he had a snapshot of what was going on. Nothing seemed to happen. We gave him the report, he quickly scanned it and dropped it on his desk. Then one day while reading one of the reports he said that we were experiencing a yield problem on one of the production lines due to a bottleneck in the test and rework cycle.

For the life of us, we could not see how he could have gleaned that from the report we had provided, but one of the team was sent out to follow up. Sure enough, there was a problem that uncorrected could have resulted in very high cost problems down the line during the system quality testing; or worse, when product had been shipped to customers.

Coincidence or cause-effect?
There were a couple of other, similar incidents through the remainder of the month, all seemingly minor in-and-of-itself. Yet, when the monthly report came out, we had met or exceeded all production goals. Over the ensuing months, we refined the data we gathered and fairly well institutionalized the practice and at the end of the year we had met or exceeded production, quality and resource utilization goals in all but one of the nine months remaining in the year. More importantly, we had met all production goals except asset utilization for the entire year!

Earl was promoted to general management of another division and his replacement felt that the cost of gathering and preparing the information was too costly. It was a down year and some of the team was redirected or released. We were back to the original processes for manufacturing and we never again met a single production goal and Earl's replacement didn't last.

Lesson learned - there is great value in the data that is produced during the manufacturing process. Seemingly unrelated tidbits of information viewed with the keen eye of curiosity often reveal startling insight. If we listen to the wisdom in this insight, we can improve our processes even as they are under way. Twenty years ago, to cost of this kind of curiosity seemed to be too high, but today's information software tools, known as Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence, take the cost of collecting, correlating and presenting this information down, effectively lowering the marginal cost of curiosity to the point where it really can pay off.

This experience is one of many embodied in the team that developed and now deliver FactoryTalk VantagePoint and FactoryTalk VantagePoint EMI. It is their mission to expose that data through thin-client web browsers so that more and more people can exercise their own curiosity to drive cost savings, increases in productivity, quality and asset use.