(1888PressRelease)
June 09, 2008 - “The Six Sigma community puts up with an amazing amount of busy work in order to become data driven,” opines Evan J Miller, President & CEO of Hertzler Systems (and manufacturer of GainSeeker). Miller asserts that frequently manufacturing executives define this data collection process as “the every day junk work that we do that we call our jobs.
The roots of this situation are deep within Six Sigma itself: Black belts are brought into training, assigned to a project, and told to go start measuring something. They are rarely IT people, but they are smart, resourceful and, very driven. They go and get some data.” In the current issue of Industry 2.0, manufacturing journalist Thomas R. Cutler, contributed an important feature article titled, “Accurate Data Collection.”
Manufacturing firms intent on capturing and distilling rich streams of data will find it. Often companies will look at a Capability Maturity Model (CMM); a typical format will show a data source, viewed in Excel. Viewing by rows and columns is common across many industries and many applications. Most data dumped from a database ends up looking like a data-rich grid, whether it is manufacturing or transactional data.
Each row represents a part that is inspected; each column a dimension or reading. Most engineers see these data tasks as an example of every “junk work” that takes hours to prepare and upkeep. One manufacturing executive reported that it took 24 Power Point slides to document this activity, which included 43 discrete steps, including two loops, one of seven steps and one of 19 steps.
According to Miller, “The time this takes is substantial. Even if only twenty variables are being tracked, it often takes 20-25 minutes to capture data for each part number. Since most companies, particularly those in metal working production, produce multiple products simultaneously, it is easy to see how an otherwise productive manufacturing professional spends his entire time preparing reports.”
Hertzler Systems (www.hertzler.com) provides seamless, accurate data acquisition solutions that drive business transformation. The company provides the leading real-time data acquisition and analytics software, the GainSeeker Suite. This powerful and flexible system is best used by lean and progressive companies. Gainseeker Suite allows companies to connect with devices and other information systems, collecting data and alarming key personnel when problems arise; this technology allows organizations to analyze data for root cause problems, converting data into knowledge.
Hertzler Systems Inc.
www.hertzler.com
Adrienne DePew
Communications Manager
info ( @ ) hertzler dot com
800.958.2709
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