It’s just telling you a story you weren’t expecting.
Recently, my team had the opportunity to work with a forward-leaning construction company. They wanted to develop a data-driven KPI platform to monitor and enhance their manufacturing and prefabrication operations.
We did great collaborative work, designing the components and functionality of the Information Asset before undertaking the technical development work. With this design work completed upfront, we were able to develop the KPI platform quickly. It is excellent, clean data insight.
So we wired it up, pulling the data from the underlying manufacturing platform, staging it for performance and quality purposes, and… Houston, we have a problem…
The measures and KPIs didn’t make sense. The data must be wrong. Ah, crap…
After significant digging and investigation, we confidently knew that the information being presented was an exact representation of the data in the system.
The punchline to the story was that there was a flow to the work in the shop, but there needed to be a documented process that included the interaction with the manufacturing system.
In this case, we skipped past the Technology foundation of our own Data Maturity Framework and moved directly to Integration and Data Insight.
And the data told us the story.
There is a line from James Clear’s great book, Atomic Habits: “You have to standardize before you optimize.”
Fortunately, this is an easy fix in days, not weeks. And the fix is in the realm and control of the business.
They are on their way to a data-enabled journey of continuous improvement. We’re excited to be with them on their journey.
