During journey of 35 years of learning experience, many routine thing has become habitual; point in context is habit of collecting data. As I was reading a book on Lean Management, the reference of Data to Wisdom, reminded me a learning experience in my initial phase of planning role.
I had an opportunity to work with a great boss known for his presence of mind, data recall ability, and passion for details. I am referring to era of early part of 1980’s, where we had very few computers and we were learning to use Lotus 123. We use to collect data of production, warehouse, quality control etc. and used to spend almost 4-5 hours every day on shop floor. My Boss had given a template for collecting data and we used to wonder what he must have been doing with this large amount of data. We were in all 11 planners covering six business areas.
Operation’s report preparation was planning function, and in one of the report, my Boss had made comment about likely capacity imbalance in six months’ time. Being new to production planning, line scheduling, I was very eager to know how he has arrived at this conclusion.
Boss explained to me, how he is collating the shop floor data of batch manufacturing for various product mix, and the analysis of batch size distribution versus the installed capacity. He has observed that in last one year, there is drastic reduction in big batch size products and increase in medium size batches. Even though overall production is showing upward trend, the product mix has changed. In last six months high value low volume products are being manufactured and hence there is delay in service level due to bottleneck of capacity at medium size batches. On one side, there is idle capacity of higher batch size equipment, while on the other, we were compelled to do extra working because of capacity mismatch at medium batch size equipment. After checking with sales and marketing team, this conclusion was confirmed. My boss went one-step ahead and asked about the likely volumes of pipeline products, which may be introduced in next 1-2 years. Mapping of which clearly indicated a constraint based on manual RCCP (Rough Cut Capacity Planning).
This incidence made me data savvy. The journey of data to information to knowledge to wisdom is engraved on my mind, and it has become my second nature. Now unknowingly I go on recording data and once enough data is collected, do the analysis to arrive at some decision making tool. That’s what is the power of data, I believe.
