How do we get smart? I was first asked this question while sitting in on a call with a small manufacturer who supplied parts for automotive manufacturers. With all the buzz around “smart manufacturing,” this manufacturer wanted to join the movement. The problem was that its leaders didn’t know where to start.

They bought sensors without any real understanding of what to do with them. When I asked why, they said they didn’t have any useful data and they needed data to be “smart.” I asked them, “How do you not have any useful data?” They said they only had documents capturing the history of each maintenance event in the facility. These “textual maintenance work orders” were hardly useful due to their unstructured, jargon-filled nature. At the time they were right; these data in its natural form seemed useless.

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