How industrial data is handled today
Whether we are in an automotive or food plant, we will find that data is already given an important relevance for decision making. This has been boosted thanks to the progressive implementation of new and more modern technologies in the different components involved in the production process: machines connected to databases compiling historical data, traceability through MES/ERP systems, etc.
This type of tools collect data and display them in a more or less predetermined way, or through a reporting module that requires certain customized developments and the truth is that this has meant a before and after for the future of many companies... but what happens when we want to correlate data from different systems, include data from other platforms, data reported by operators, or simply want to display the data in a way that is easier to interpret? Well, we turn to our old and valuable friend: spreadsheets. Call it Excel, Calc or Google Sheet..
The truth is that it is an agile and extremely flexible tool and we usually get a lot of value in the first iterations: a simple graph with production grouped by months, etc. and it will be easy to maintain as long as we don't need to grow much more. At Muutech ourselves, we use Excel to manage some simple things. What's the problem? It is very easy to want to add more and more graphs, data and calculations, especially when teaching colleagues, bosses, etc. And why don't we add an additional sheet where I paste the data I export from SAP or MES every day? And with a VLOOKUP, everything is magically imported!
The problems start to appear then:
- The more rows and sheets you import, the longer it takes to perform the calculations... on more than one occasion the software crashes.
- Adding a new column becomes hell.
- Suddenly other colleagues and departments start using your Excel: if you go on vacation or have a difficult day, they are so dependent on you that you have become the company's Excel "guru".
- To these colleagues or bosses you have to send every day by email the report and some of them even print it (wasn't the idea of this to avoid paper?) ... and it takes up more and more, saturating your mail and making you waste time every day first thing in the morning that you could be devoting to other tasks of greater value (or simply of value, since you suspect that they only look at what you send them from time to time, or only when there are problems).
The result for the company:
- You (and probably your colleagues who have decided to follow suit and version or make their own spreadsheets), a valuable resource to the company, spend 1-2 hours a day on this task.
- This leads to too many "sources of truth", too many reports, stored in email or printed on paper without date, making them difficult to manage and leading to the cost of making data-driven decisions becoming increasingly high, potentially exceeding the cost of doing it on paper.
- A solution has become a new problem, since the fact that everyone works with different Excels causes loss of time, discussions, errors when changing a piece of data ("but I only added one column", "didn't it automatically read all the rows?"). And if you start to doubt the veracity of a piece of data, it is automatically invalidated for decision making.