In some cases “ignorance is bliss,” but when it comes to running a lean and profitable manufacturing operation, not knowing the truth can greatly hinder your business.  Some manufacturers feel they have a good pulse on plant metrics. Manually recorded data (pen & paperr), provides them with OEE, Downtime and Productivity measurements.  The reality is when plants move to an automated data collection process, it tells the opposite of what you thought.

Our research shows that manually collected data can lead to the wrong continuous improvement decisions.  In the process of automating plant floor data collection for our customers, a common theme we hear is that their manually collected data had led them to believe the machines were not running fast enough, so obviously they asked their operators to run faster. The automated data actually showed there was a lot of unrecorded downtime, so rather than address the real problem of down time they were focusing on the wrong area. We see this time and again – don’t continue to chase ‘CI ghosts!’ Don’t focus your valuable CI dollars in the wrong area!