Talk about a competitive business. Toyota Racing Development is using Surface Tablets for its trackside strategy.
Instant feedback from the car in a light-weight mobile device gives TRD a leading edge by allowing the crew to monitor, communicate instantaneously and provide real-time corrections to the driver with clear concise and precise instructions. This is a great example of how a company can improve the transparency and operational efficiency.
In manufacturing you will see this called a manufacturing execution system (MES) or part of a maintenance and repair system (MRO)
What the average Canadian business needs to do is to identify what type of information is worth measuring, and would operations improve dramatically by measuring it every hour or every minute. Would you be able to make a correction to the process or prevent disaster.
Recently we were at a customer called Custom Foam who uses a ‘old-school’ method of reporting back manufacturing flow. They monitor the output of each department and count pieces and enter this into the computer. If one department is gaining ground and working faster than the other, than the management team knows there will be an equal dip in performance coming in an another area. The graph resembles a S curve while they are trying to keep it a straight line.