Digital Transformation on the Manufacturing Floor
Practical Examples of Value Creation: How will digital transformation create real value for a manufacturing company? Let’s use the factory floor as a testbed ...
IoT Field Notes: Who are you Disrupting?
When introducing IoT ideas to your markets, you may be disrupting more than you think! Some specific examples and caveats ...
Who is Using the System? Tracking in the Enterprise
For years, web sites have been measured - and valued - by user traffic. Who is looking at this site? When are they coming, and how long are they staying? Driven by the advertising business model that values "impressions", web analytics have evolved in a number of ways; the interest has shifted from Passive to Active. Advertisers want to know who is clicking, selecting, comparing, buying, and abandoning. Games track Daily Average Users, Social Networks quantify contributions and visualize connections,…
The Cost of Poor Quality
Think of these metrics as a quick way to “take the pulse” of your quality control and customer satisfaction efforts.
SQDC for Enterprise IT – Quality, Delivery
One of a series of posts on presenting a summarized view of Corporate IT using SQDC-style KPIs - a Lean Management-inspired way of speaking in a language your Manufacturing Operations teams will understand.
SQDC for Enterprise IT – Introduction, Safety
First in a series of posts on presenting a summarized view of Corporate IT using SQDC-style KPIs - a Lean Management-inspired way of speaking in a language your Manufacturing Operations teams will understand.
Hacking the Google Chart API from Excel
a bit of code on a Saturday night ... I've written before about a simple way to measure and report IT value to the business - quantifying alignment with strategic initiatives project spend in context. It all culminated with a single, simple slide - numbers, with some Tufte-esque Sparklines thrown in. Well, technologies come and go, and without going into the boring details, I've had to come up with a new way to generate the mini-bar charts along the left…
Where to Start? (2 of 2) Metrics & Measurements
Bullet point #1 in your executive-friendly PowerPoint about "Achieving Operational Excellence in IT" covers Process and Procedure; so how do we measure our effectiveness? I'm a big proponent of Metrics and Measurements as well - but often times the biggest challenge is where to start? Measure the Unmeasured In most organizations (especially manufacturers!), the business has plenty of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that tell them how much productivity they are seeing, how much money they are saving, and how they…
IT and the Business are Closer Than You Think
A few passing observations from the last few months; contrary to what many (IT/business) folks believe, they are just as good or just as bad in managing processes and projects as their counterparts in (business/IT). Problem Resolution is Everybody's Problem A few weeks ago I was discussing issues that came up with one of our systems, and the team was a bit dismayed that the user community was still finding errors (we should be trapping for that stuff!) I pointed…
Optimizing the Wrong Part of Knowledge Management
I sat in on the report-out session from a kaizen event this week, and something occurred to me as I reviewed a ton of interesting findings in a very short time ... Best Practice Self-contained deliverables are the most powerful tools for knowledge knowledge transfer you can have in your organization. I'm talking about a document that stands on its own, and effectively communicates an idea without needing the author nearby to explain anything. The topic doesn't matter - conceptual…