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.

In the first quarter of 2007, my company conducted a complex-manufacturing research survey of 1,473 senior management level executives (CEO, COO, CFO, vice-president of operations). Complex manufacturers were defined as those employing “other than exclusively repetitive manufacturing processes” including engineer-to-order, made-to-order, and assemble-to-order. The data include a wide range of industry cross-sections, geography, public and private companies, numbers of employees, and annual revenues, and revealed a clear change from a similar survey done in 2000.

Customer relationship management (CRM) usually refers to sales activities, and CRM software is commonly purchased, and occasionally used, to track potential customers, existing customers and sales activities.

More than 13 hours per week creating documents and nearly seven hours per week organizing documents are common among small and midsize engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturers; four hours per week are spent managing document routing and another 10 hours per week searching for information. All this time searching for documents is waste and counter to lean initiatives and established efficiency metrics.