In recent months, we’ve learned that manufacturing during a global health crisis puts organizations under immense pressure to maintain operational efficiency while upholding product quality and employee safety.

Initially, organizations focused simply on taking the steps required to survive. However, as organizations around the globe have pivoted to overcome those initial challenges, manufacturers are taking the opportunity to explore how they will not just survive but become more resilient—even thrive—going forward.

Recent operational challenges have shined a light on existing process weaknesses and technology limitations. Manufacturers are taking their cue and proactively identifying opportunities to optimize processes, empower workers, and make operations across the organization more effective.

Enact, InfinityQS’ cloud-native quality intelligence platform, offers plant leadership a variety of ways to make their operations more effective. Here are six Enact benefits that can help your organization make critical shifts that are necessary for the future of manufacturing.

It’s been 40 years since “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?”, W. Edwards Deming, and total quality management. More than 33 years have passed since the release of the first iteration of ISO 9001 (remember checklists?). For four decades the importance of building quality into processes rather than trying to “inspect in” quality has been pounded into our little quality management brains. Proactive good, reactive bad. We get it.

Or do we?

Despite “risk management” or “risk-based thinking” becoming part of everyday quality parlance, quality on the ground is still largely reactionary. Tactical rather than strategic. In short, we still seem to be just “doing” quality rather than mastering it, i.e., we are using traditional quality processes and tools at only the shop-floor level rather than using next-generation enterprisewide quality tools throughout our entire organization.

In the intro to this series we noted that, too often, quality tools and the data we glean from them are used only to solve immediate, mostly shop-floor problems. These gold nuggets of opportunity aren’t used in an equally valuable way to address a company’s strategic goals.

Here we’ll consider how to master quality at the shop-floor, tactical level. More than just byproducts of the production process, quality data are the vital signs that determine if individual processes—and by extension, the entire production system—are healthy. That information can in turn help drive business strategy.

It starts on the shop floor

For most companies, learning to use data to their best advantage entails drifting between visionary potential and problematic reality—the strategic vs. tactical tension. As part of this inevitable tug-of-war, data are rounded up, variability is tamped down, and quality anxiously measured.

If you're involved in business you know: Strategy matters. Your strategies guide you to reach your objectives. Behind every successful business are purposeful strategies. Then again, as Alvin Toffler said, “The absence of strategy is fine if you don’t care where you’re going.”

We’re talking specifically about data-driven strategies like using “improving operational efficiency” to support a goal of increasing your profit margin. Or “improving product standardization” to increase international market share. The question is, how do you support your data-driven strategies? Where do your data come from?

Many leaders don’t realize they are probably sitting on a gold mine of data just waiting to be transformed into actionable information to support their strategies. I’m talking about the quality control data that are collected every day on the shop floor.