On the dashboard of my factory

After last month, when I wrote about it, we collected a lot of data, from our ERP and MES systems, from our PLCs, and also some additional notes from factory workers. That’s great, isn’t it? Now we can start improving our production facility, be more effective, reduce waste and energy consumption and be best in class.

But wait, where do we start? This pile of data is no more accessible than the paper notebooks and spreadsheets we collected in the past. Which items do we need to look at to start improving? Did we just collect all this data to only make our problems bigger and even less easy to find? Why did we spend all that money on getting sensors and a data gateway installed? We aren’t closer to becoming more effective and sustainable at all – we even waste more energy now.