Welcome back! This is blog #3 in my three-part series about how different users within a given manufacturing organization use Enact®, our cloud-native quality intelligence platform to improve quality control. Blog #1 was a look at the operators—the soldiers on the frontline of the battle to maintain quality. Soldiers get great use out of the dashboards, the easy personalization, the alerts and notifications, and the mobility of Enact. And blog #2 focused on the firefighters—the quality inspectors and managers who spend their days solving manufacturing problems. Firefighters get the most from Enact’s powerful analysis tools and checklists.
This blog picks up with the corporate and Six Sigma users—the
generals of manufacturing. Let’s take a look at what
they like about Enact.
About the Generals
In short, corporate and Six Sigma users, our generals, use Enact—and love it—for the aggregated dashboards (for analysis), the grading methodology (to see what’s happening at a glance and plan accordingly), and its mobility (so they can see the information they need—from anywhere).
Let’s take a look at each of these features in Enact, and see why they’re important for the generals.
Dashboards
Dashboards in Enact are all about the tiles they contain. Tiles can be any number of things: from data collection to grading, enterprise-wide to close-up part views, and much more. As a user, you have the power to create your own dashboards with any information you want or need to see. And dashboards in Enact are designed to be shared. This standardization benefits the generals: everyone is reading from the same page, you don’t need multiple dashboards to analyze an issue together.
Pictured is a raw dashboard. Here you can keep track of data collection, alerts and notifications, checklists, and charting (you may remember this from part two of this blog series: firefighters). This specific example is of charting.
The raw dashboard is obviously helpful, but what if you have lots of data to compare? This is where having an aggregated dashboard at your fingertips can be extremely valuable.
Aggregated Dashboards
What is most useful for generals is an aggregated dashboard, especially one that uses the grading tiles. This tool is great for quick analysis, drilling down to find the root of whatever your issue might be. The tiles you choose for your aggregated dashboard help you prioritize the opportunities for improvement within your organization. Aggregated data can be analyzed by the feature, part, process, or even site.
About Enact Grading
Enact’s grading methodology is a great tool for quality pros who want to “interrogate” their data—dig deeper into it than they ever have before—in order to prioritize their efforts.
Grading provides a summary analysis of individual data streams.
A data stream is the data provided by the unique combination of a single feature measured for a single part running on a single process. Individual data streams can be rolled up to provide a grade for each critical feature for an entire process, part, or site. This gives you the benefits of rolled-up comparisons without losing the granularity of the raw data.
And Enact automatically does all of this work for you.
Enact’s grading methodology provides a simple letter-number combination—for example, A3 or B1 in the graphic above—that represents both expected and potential yield. Together, these yield metrics reflect performance in a way that enables prioritization:
- Stream potential measures how well you could be doing. This component is graded as A, B, or C.
- Stream performance measures of how much a yield is suffering because it is not performing up to its potential. This component is graded as 1, 2, or 3.
So, what does all this mean? The two components together create nine possible grades from A1 to C3, which paint a very clear and concise picture of your overall process performance and potential for improvement.
At a glance, Enact grading enables generals to see where your potential improvements lie. You can then drill down to see details and plan accordingly.
Mobility
As a general, you need mobility. You may sometimes spend the day moving about and meeting people on the shop floor; another day you may need to be in a conference room, briefing upper management. Because Enact is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, you have that mobility. It’s a powerful concept. You can view the information you need anytime, anywhere. All you need is an internet connection.
If you’re in a meeting and something comes up—about which you may need to illustrate a facet of your production—you can easily call up the appropriate information on a tablet and show that to your audience. Or if you are travelling and stuck at an airport, and you’re wondering how your sites are doing, you can easily access Enact from your phone or tablet. That’s a game-changer because, let’s face it, it’s rare that you (or the right decision makers) are always in the right place, or are in the same place at the same time—with Enact it’s a given that you can call up important information and then enable you or your decision makers to act quickly on a given issue. Enact’s mobility levels the playing field for generals.
Closing
These three aspects of Enact are very useful for our generals—the corporate and Six Sigma users. Aggregated dashboards, the grading methodology (only Enact has it!), and mobility. You can see why generals love Enact—it’s easy to use and powerful.
Thanks for joining me for this series! It was fun to think of the various Enact users as soldiers, firefighters, and generals, and explain why this unique SaaS tool is invaluable in their manufacturing worlds. I hope it was fun for you, too. I’ll continue to write about Enact and the best ways for you to improve your organization’s manufacturing quality. Please join me.
In the meantime, please feel free to learn more about
Enact.
Read the other blogs in this series:
Soldiers, Firefighters, and Generals: Part 1
Soldiers, Firefighters, and Generals: Part 2