According to a recent LNS Research survey, 37 percent of quality leaders cite an inability to measure quality metrics as their No. 1 barrier to achieving quality goals. Even worse, the survey showed four in five companies have poor visibility into real-time metrics.

These figures highlight a central problem in quality management: In an era of increasingly large data sets, how can manufacturers leverage these data for meaningful improvement?

It’s a question that’s especially relevant for manufacturers engaged in layered process audits (LPAs), a high-frequency verification strategy where teams conduct short audits every shift. With hundreds or even thousands of audits taking place during the course of a year, making sense of a large volume of data is a core challenge of LPA programs.

While plant managers often track metrics at a granular level, executives need to look at the data a little differently. Let’s look at four of the most important enterprise-level LPA metrics to track.

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