It’s Not The End Of The World!

Oh boy, the 21^st of December is the end of the world. Again. I think in this case, we can be pretty sure that it is not going to happen, apparently there were errors in way that the calculations were done with the Gregorian calendar mean that we probably should already have disappeared.

Data can be quite so misleading, as can selective interpretation. It happens all over the place, including on the shop-floor. Systems that collect data can be easily misinterpreted. Sometimes it is accidental, a genuine misunderstanding, or perhaps a case where the data or understanding of the data is not explicit enough. In other cases, the meaning of the data can be manipulated to fit or show a particular pattern from which a story can be told.

The stories about the end of the work have not affected me. I don’t believe them, irrespective of where they come from. We see reports however where people do believe, and make huge changes in their lives as part of the preparation. The damage to such people’s lives is incalculable. The shop-floor by comparison is not going to seem so “life or death”, but relatively equal damage can be done.

 I have heard in my experience so many comments about “flavour of the month” where the focus is on a particular topic that is felt to be important, to the exclusion of all else. A month later, a different flavour. What happened as a result of last month? Sure, some numbers improved. Some other, perhaps ignored numbers, got worse. The flavour changes. Was there really an overall benefit? A year from now, the changes fade away. It is very frustrating. Data can lead us down so many incorrect routes.

Preparing Recommendations

 As with the “end of the world”, people are looking for the “truth”. My own area of expertise is the shop-floor, so I can only comment on that. We need to understand the whole picture, how things relate to other things, how things combine to create challenges or opportunities. We need to define what control is, what is in control, and what is out of control. We need to be alerted when things go out of control, and take timely controlled action. We certainly don’t need a dramatic off the wall interpretation of isolated data to kill us all off.

This is a large part of the value of reporting from an integrated systems such as our Valor MSS product in that the complete visibility of all aspects of the operation is available. No more flavours of the month, no more crazy end of the work scenarios please…….