In today’s fast-paced connected world, you and your organization create an abundance of data. In the past, large corporations with multiple locations relied on in person site visits or information provided by the on-site team for updates to productivity in facilities. But what if there was a way to do this remotely?
Thanks to advanced technology, and as long as the proper data is collected, regional and corporate employees can now get close to real time access to key production numbers to determine how on schedule a processing plant is without a visit or phone call by using only a few keystrokes on an electronic device. A big spotlight was cast on this with the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020. As travel came to a grinding halt, companies began looking at how they could collect data and organize it in a way that could be useful remotely.
For one company, which had a network of nearly 200 industrial sites across North America and the use of several connected systems for tracking equipment usage and productivity, there was never a better time to focus on how to take all the data currently being collected, identify other data needed, and find a way to organize this data so it could be easily viewed in a dashboard format to help identify trends and point out key information that could be used to improve results.
A committee was established to start the process and review a previous project that was started but never fully completed. This team consisted of corporate engineers, IT professionals and regional production directors. A baseline of what was needed was established and more items were added, while others removed as the scope was better defined. There was some data being collected that could be used, but much of this data was only being collected at the location level. The data needed to be connected and collected and sent somewhere so it could be used in the dashboard being created. The key players in IT Networking were identified and the process of connecting the equipment with the proper security protocols to the network began. This involved coordination with locations to determine where to run and terminate networking cables and configure equipment network cards properly, which required working with equipment vendors to change and test connections once complete.
Once connected, another team had to determine where this data was going and how it would be stored. Was it going to be a data warehouse with structured data or a data lake collection just dumping all the data in a storage place to be extracted by another program? Since this dashboard was taking data from multiple sources for different things, a combination of both could work well. The dashboard needed to be developed with another team to help take the data and put it into a useful display that was both easy to read and understand and had the capability of translating the data efficiently and quickly.
Identifying key stakeholders at all steps and holding them accountable for ensuring their portion of the project was completed in a timely manner was difficult since it stretched across multiple departments in the organization. Identifying an executive sponsor early in the project helped to bring the departments together because they knew this initiative had full top-down support as it aligned with the overall organizational goals of increasing productivity and reliability through accountability and visibility. The dashboard and data being displayed provides useful information for not only determining the productivity of one of the plants, but can also highlight any extended reliability issues with equipment by showing equipment that is down for extended amounts of time or taking longer to process goods than it should. The key dashboard items can drill down to get more detailed information of the data that created the dashboard metric to help identify issues and opportunities for improvement.
This project, which was pushed forward quickly due to the necessity of the pandemic, will continue to grow and be beneficial in the future. The dashboard is built to allow other metrics to be tracked, giving it flexibility for the future. Colleting the data requires a lot of cooperation between multiple parts of an organization. Properly identifying key stakeholders and gaining executive sponsorship can help the project move more smoothly.
Sometimes, digital transformation is spurred by necessity, created by events out of our control.
