Manufacturing firms intent on capturing and distilling rich streams of data will find them. Companies will often look at a capability maturity model (CMM) in rows and columns—a format common across many industries and many applications—in Excel. Most data dumped from a database end up in a grid, whether it’s manufacturing or transactional data.

Each row may represent a part that is inspected, each column a dimension or reading. Most engineers see these data tasks as junk work that takes hours to prepare and keep up with. One manufacturing executive reported that it took 24 PowerPoint slides to document this activity, including 43 discrete steps, including two loops, one of seven steps and one of 19 steps.

“The Six Sigma community puts up with an amazing amount of busy work in order to become data-driven,” says Evan J. Miller, president and CEO of Hertzler Systems. “Frequently, manufacturing executives define this data collection process as ‘the every day junk work that we do that we call our jobs,’” he asserts. “The roots of this situation are deep within Six Sigma itself: Black Belts are brought into training, assigned to a project, and told to go start measuring something. They are rarely IT people, but they are smart, resourceful, and very driven. They go and get some data.

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