There’s a lot of buzz about “data analytics”—mining huge data sets to discover invisible patterns of customer behavior that can be leveraged to maximize sales. But I’ve found that few people know how to mine the hidden improvement projects from existing “small data” using Excel’s PivotTables.

Over the years, I have used Excel PivotTables on projects that:
• Saved $20 million in postage expenses
• Save $16 million in adjustment costs
• Reduced order errors in a cell phone company from 17 to 3 percent in just four months, saving $3 million a year in rework
• Reduced denied insurance claims in a health care system that saved $5 million a year with simple process changes that could be implemented immediately

Using PivotTables for data mining is the key to finding multimillion-dollar improvement projects.

What small data look like

Almost every business I’ve ever consulted with has data about defects, mistakes, and errors in an Excel spreadsheet. These data are a line-by-line, date-by-date, account of the origin and type of defect. For packaging defects on a production line, the data might look like this:

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