First of all, if you are even gathering and analyzing data at all, that’s a great start. It encourages the right mindset and means that you are trying to improve your manufacturing process. On the other hand, if you don’t trust your data and have weak data reliability, that data becomes completely useless.
- Are you hesitant to act on your data?
- Do you frequently want to rerun the numbers to make sure everything was correct?
- Do you question the credibility of your data, and seek information from other sources?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, you need to take a step back and reevaluate your options. Data that can’t be trusted is a huge issue, and it becomes a large waste of time among other things.
Data Does Not Help You
(On its own)
If you find that you are hesitant to use your data, hesitant to make any decisions based on your data, and hesitant to act on your data, then what’s the point of acquiring it? Spoiler alert- there really isn’t one. At this point, you are basically just gathering data and information for the sake of gathering it. Not only does this not help you, but it is also setting you back in other areas. You are wasting time, money, resources, and losing production by gathering and analyzing data that you won’t use.
This is why data reliability is so important. Without reliable data, your time and monetary investment get thrown out the window.
What Now?
If you see yourself in a situation similar to this, what do you do? Do you just have to learn to trust your data? Of course not. If you currently don’t trust your data, there’s likely a good reason for that. Maybe you have proven the data to be wrong in the past, maybe you know that it is not being gathered from a reliable source. It could simply be the fact that the data is reliant on humans recording it. We are all well aware that humans make mistakes, and in this case, it causes inaccuracy in the data. Even if a human recording data is “usually’ spot on, what happens when you see a surprising number? Would you trust it enough to act on it, or question it and blame the person who recorded it?
You need to have complete confidence in the data if you are going to actually take advantage of it. You need to get yourself into a system that you can trust. A solution that delivers high-quality and accurate data that is efficient, does not rely on humans recording information, and comes from a very reliable source. Don’t waste your time and energy with a solution that you don’t trust.
Good Data Reliability = Confident Decisions that Drive Action
Even if you “kinda” trust your data, do you trust it enough to make a confident decision and take action? To invest more time, effort, money, and resources into fixing the inefficiency you found? The answer is likely no, or a hesitant maybe. It’s tough to say yes, you can’t be all-in if you are unsure of the credibility.
That is why it’s so important to have a reliable system for gathering and analyzing data. Good data reliability translates to a confident decision. Furthermore, when it comes to acting on your decisions, it’s much easier to act on a decision that you are 100% confident in.
As I mentioned previously, data alone does not help you, simply looking at a set of numbers will not get you anywhere. Making decisions and turning those decisions into action is what will drive improvement. Equip yourself with the right tools to help you solve real challenges.
Improve Efficiency with Good Data Reliability
Solutions with strong data reliability allow you to tackle a problem or inefficiency and move right on to the next. Modern plant floor solutions such as an MES or IIoT solution deliver real-time data to decision-makers constantly. This means you can find an inefficiency quickly, make an adjustment, and again quickly gauge whether that adjustment made a positive impact or not.
This gives employees and operators a lot of clarity. No lingering thoughts in your head wondering if you made the right decision or not based on weak or incomplete data.
Weak data and a lack of data continues to be a huge problem among manufacturing companies. A recent study concluded that 4 out of 5 manufacturers are completely unaware of their own downtime. They have no idea where it’s coming from. You can easily attribute this to simply not having the proper data or systems in place.
Further on that point, downtime get’s extremely expensive. In some industries within the manufacturing sector, the cost of downtime gets up to over $250,000 per hour. That’s a lot of money being thrown away. To each their own, but to me, I’d say that’s a problem worth looking into, and it all starts with gathering data.
This further stresses the importance of having good and reliable data that you can trust. Invest in a solution that provides you with credible information, and the results will quickly prove the value.
