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Time on the factory floor is precious. Are you working harder than you should be trying to understand business performance?
It’s amazing what being restricted does to our psychology. Having been cooped up inside for a couple of months, the yearning for anything that resembles “normal” is as high as ever. Outdoor dining looks like not just a safe necessity, but a catharsis of sorts - a symbol of our ability to be free and enjoy ourselves again. Hiking trail parking lots are routinely crowded, golf course memberships are up, and many retail stores have shattered monthly records largely because going shopping is something we’re allowed to do again.
Beyond that yearning for normalcy, I’ve observed another major change in people - the systematic shedding of sources of frustration. When restrictions are placed upon us that are out of our control, one way we feel like we can regain control is to start pulling up weeds elsewhere in our lives.
These could be silly things, such as - “why do I run to the store 3X a month for the same item when I could just put it on Prime delivery” - to more existential questions, like - “how the hell do I run a $10M/year manufacturing plant and have no ability to see any data about how my operation is doing”?
A chance to reassess
One of the few silver linings of this pandemic is it has given us the ability to reassess what’s important to us: what we spend our time on, who we spend it with, and where our finite energy goes. The lack of efficient access to information is a weed that has grown in manufacturing facilities for quite a long time, primarily due to a shortage of simple, modern, and effective solutions to the problem.
The past couple of months were a serious stress test for operations leaders. With many key personnel having to work from home, thereby needing to run the factory with a lean crew of essential workers, the classic methods of obtaining information were brought to their knees. People were running around with clipboards, paper scraps, and flashlights looking for answers while leadership teams, pushed to the brink on resources and workload, were left asking themselves “why are we working so hard on something that should be so easy??”
The path to victory
The good news is that overcoming inefficient access to information is simpler than you realize. If you partner with the right solution provider, you'll never have to feel frustrated again about not seeing, understanding, or benchmarking your factory’s performance. Moreover, you'll gain the mechanical advantage of prioritizing where and how your problem solvers spend their time based on the actual needs of the day.
Our demo and installation rates are soaring, and the reason why is very clear - as we go through the process of shedding our inefficiencies, it is no longer acceptable to work hard on easy problems. Efficient access to information about the performance of your business is as essential as it gets in 2020, and it should be a strength of your operation, not a sore spot. As one prospect recently said during a demo, "if I'm not doing shop floor data analytics within the next 5 years, I'm guaranteed to be out of business within the next 10."
If you’re feeling blind about how your factory is performing, or are underwhelmed and even frustrated by what your current data systems provide, our product was purpose-built for people just like you. Reach out to us for a demo and we’ll have this and many other frustrations wiped out for you very quickly.
