Lean manufacturing: A cry for improved data quality

The embracing of lean manufacturing by the manufacturing industry endorses the effectiveness of this concept. A methodology that cuts the fat out of manufacturing costs at every stage of the operation, manufacturers have found lean manufacturing particularly effective as a weapon against low-cost competitors, lengthening their corporate life-spans.

In today`s Web-enabled economy, virtually all aspects of modern supply chains are defined by business data - data on many fluctuating factors, such as the costs of raw materials, labour, fuel, real estate, warehousing and shipping, plus consumer patterns, reseller-arrangements, insurance rates, security needs - even weather patterns. A constant flow of varying data needs to be continually weighed and evaluated to determine if, when and how a manufacturing supply chain should be adjusted, or how efficiencies might best be gained.

Looking at newer trends such as RFID for product and parts inventory management, manufacturing systems need to be able to accurately track and analyse an exponentially greater volume of data than most currently do. For this technology to achieve its full potential and stated goals within corporations, data management systems need to process and cleanse data on millions of separate entities each day.

For at the end of the day, tracking and analysis of all RFID-tagged items is only as good as the data that is collected and analysed.

Said Mark Cooper, managing director of MigrationWare, a provider of total data quality solutions: "While a great deal of attention has been paid to harnessing all of this data through data integration, business intelligence and business process management systems and portals, lean manufacturing is also a cry for improved data quality. Data is the raw material at the very heart of all of this fluctuating information, feeding analytical tools and systems. But if that data is inaccurate or out of date, all of the down-stream results that emanate from its analysis will be skewed."

Bombardier transportation, a leader in the rail equipment manufacturing and servicing industry, uses MigrationWare`s Trillium Software System to cleanse and standardise data, describing more than 2.8 million inventory parts at its plants throughout the world. "The company represents a growing number of multinational companies that are applying data quality management across their entire enterprises to give knowledge workers the accurate and timely business data required to perform strategic analyses, inventory management, procurement and a host of additional corporate operations," said Cooper.

According to Kevin Carrick, project director of SAP Services at Bombardier, getting a global, harmonised and consolidated view of their supply chain was a major driver and by implementing the Trillium Software System, the company can truly understand its supply chain, inventory and product landscape data

In many ways, the push for lean manufacturing is an echo of the total quality management movement from the 1980s, which still raises the competitive bar on a global basis today. While that movement codified standards and methodologies for ensuring quality processes, it looked upon data management systems and IT as another tool rather than part of the problem.

Since most of manufacturing was not automated back then, this was understandable. But with the advent of the Web, extranets, intranets and Web services, manufacturing (like practically every other business) now bases virtually all of its operations on IT systems. These systems produce and are also driven by data flows, which requires data to be accurate for those operations to work efficiently and profitably.

This applies equally to every department that manufacturing touches within the 21st century corporation - sales, engineering, finance, and certainly the boardroom. All departments need the ability to easily tap into manufacturing and supply chain data to get a reading of the state of a given project, how separate departments and the entire company are faring vs competitors, and the relative health of the corporation.