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One of the drivers of lean manufacturing methods is the concept that keeping things as simple as possible will give benefits in understanding and executing manufacturing processes. There is a great benefit in keeping things simple and our company has always concentrated on simplifying processes. In fact one of our slogans is Identify, Simpify, Automate.

However, I disagree with the extreme belief that only pencil and paper should be used to solve all manufacturing challenges. Factory Logic, a lean manufacturing support company in Austin Texas, recently released results of a survey. 75% of the respondents reported that they have problems with data integrity. 71% answering the same survey believe that too much time is spent on manual data collection and calculations.

The concerns that I have with a totally manual data collection approach are:

  1. Operating an enterprise without trusted measurements removes the ability to improve a process. If you can't trust the measurements, you will not be able to discern whether you are improving. Combining measurements from different work areas or plants will lead to the question of whether or not the same procedures were actually followed to collect the measurements.
  2. Leaving measurements entirely to humans does encourage non-value added activities. Employees must stand and write down measured results. Measurements at individual stations must be aggregated manually. Someone must preform the calculations to draw the right conclusions.
  3. Any manual method is inherently non real-time and is useful only for historical analysis and not guiding improvments during process execution. This is a particular problem for high speed production.

Having objective measurements can spur improvements when they are presented in an undestandable manner. For instance, the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) measurements can objectively track and present nonproductive events in a number of different manners. Leaving measurements to be manually tracked will tend to emphasize uptime because this is a natural human tendency.

So is data collection a non-value added activity? It probably is if the individual operator must perform manual entry. However, if it is automated and available in a manner that can be used to drive plant wide performance then it can be invaluable.

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