Board members and shareholder are forever demanding more productivity, profitability and growth of every manufacturer, airline, and defense contractor. So the need for more rapid and successful decisions on operations and production can literally be the difference in percentage points of yield, energy, and waste results to the tune of impacting hundreds of millions of dollars.
It’s also no secret that data-driven decisions will maximize success and the ability to modernize, measure, and monitor assets at scale becomes the primary driver for digital transformation and AI initiatives. Success for these projects will rest upon the ability to get the right data in a timely fashion but, unfortunately, the current reliance of developing, populating, and updating spreadsheets won’t meet the realities of a world expecting digital speed.
Here are the six signs that signal you are relying on basic spreadsheets, and it is no longer in your operation’s best interest.
- Too many digital blind spots
Most commercial and almost all classified area manufacturing processes are not instrumented or instrument-able resulting in upwards of 75% of digital blind spots, leaving manufacturers without a complete data picture to make strategic decisions.
2. Every manufacturer has their own complexities
“Multiple complex Excel sheets” tells the story, doesn’t it? You’re not running a single lemonade stand here. You’re running a network of thousands of lemonade stands, lemon tree groves, juicing plants, ingredients, quality control, packaging, labeling, warehousing, transportation, and pricing spread out across the entire globe. Arrowing around cell by cell, sheet by sheet to input data is tedious, and frankly, a waste of your time.
3. Time delays impact production decisions
Do you have time to burn? No! You’ve got yield to maximize, waste to minimize, equipment to maintain, assets to track, environments to monitor, and living breathing workers to manage. Being a wiz at constructing complex Excel formulas is impressive, but how much time will it save you when you’re dealing with oceans of data? The point of computers is that they should do all the complex computational work. Not you.
4. Analysis Paralysis is pervasive
Once you have all of those complicated formulas formulated and data being derived from other data, that’s great. But how do you make sense of it all. Again, when you’re dealing with plant operations across dozens, if not hundreds, of processes, siphoning tons of data from a variety of systems such as ERP, MES, and MOM, combined with the data produced through manual means is difficult to fully digest and take proper action on. Industry 4.0 smart manufacturing improves yields, quality, safety, and compliance while recalls, waste, and downtime are dramatically minimized by using AI to identify material movements, correlations, and root causes. If your goal is to operate with agility, attempting to analyze sophisticated data manually isn’t going to cut it. You’ll be spending all your time reading instead of reacting — or better yet, being proactive.
5. Manuel processing equates to real costs
While the notion of implementing automated systems may sound daunting and expensive, consider that smart manufacturing has accounted for a 25 percent improvement in productivity and a 50 percent reduction in the rate of defects. So sure, you may end up spending less on a few Excel licenses, but the cost of relying on spreadsheets and grit will result in a net negative to your bottom line. Specifically, the ongoing costs involved in the personnel required to manually collect and report data from systems current not intrumented or even instrumentable, not to mention the potential costs involved for error creep and time delays.
6. Lack of a trusted single source of truth
With all those spreadsheets floating around, how do you know which one is THE master copy? Hopefully you’re not emailing copies around either, because each time a file is emailed, that’s a new version floating around your servers. And while most spreadsheets can be made into shared documents, collaboration isn’t exactly what these apps are known for. When the stakes are this high — with tens of millions of operational dollars hanging in the balance — it isn’t wise to rely on tools that aren’t specifically designed for your work and your industry.
The good news is that eliminating the need for spreadsheets and manual data collection by delivering digital data in real time is now possible with the latest in IIoT asset tracking and digital twin solutions. If you have 30 mins, then Thinaer can take you through a process customized to identify your current data blind spots so you will better understand where your data gaps prevent a complete picture for your AI and BI initiatives.
Let’s discuss your digital blind spot data issues and understand where your digital transformation and AI initiatives may be at most risk. Our experts are ready to answer all of your questions and help you get a handle on your digital transformation processes and AI initiatives.