Data Silos: the Silent Killer of Insights
Data Silos: the Silent Killer of Insights
A short blog on correcting and preventing silos.
Have you ever wondered why you can’t seem to get the deeper level insight you’re looking for in your plant or across your plant locations? It may be caused by what are called ‘Data Silos’.
What they are:
Data (or Information) Silos are independent locations of specified information that is collected manually, automatically, or calculated. These can be digital or paper-based information silos. Data Silos can be dangerous and restrict access to deeper level insight sought out by upper level management and teams that are tasked with Continuous Improvement initiatives. Whether you are in a plant or corporate headquarters, you might be familiar with data silos and are feeling the affects of them on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Why it’s a problem:
One of the top issues with data silos is that there is limited transparency to operations, quality, safety, and maintenance that goes on within the plant. Each department most times operates as a singular unit almost as its own organization with limited insight or communication to other parts of the business. Management sometimes are notified of this by employees or take notice of company silos on their own. Which poses the question: do you have data silos? If you do, it can cause undue stress on your position as you are attempting to innovate processes, products, and culture without context to a holistic operation.
Common issues also include not being able to make decisions based on several different factors at a time, silos are a drain on company resources, and silos discourage collaborative work. This can cost your organization time, money, and personnel resources to trace down information in order to make critical business decisions. The quicker you can get a hold of information, the quicker you can make more informed, and innovative operations decisions.
How silos happen:
Silos are most commonly due to company culture and foundational practices established by the company at its birth. Many times we face operations that have spread out, paper-based systems for data collection, management, and quality assurance in silos of their own called filing cabinets; making it difficult to get any level of insight to these areas of operations. Paper-based systems pose a variety of threats that include, but are not limited to:
- Inaccurate data, leading to inaccurate results
- Limited to No Transparency
- Disconnected Processes and Teams
- Lack of Efficient Decision-Making
The other type of common silo we see is a general server that receives information from machines, scales, and other unique tools that send data directly to a server meant for hosting operations data… most commonly never to be seen again, unless intervened with. These silos are only natural for plenty of organizations and work well for general operations up to a certain point.
Data silos can also come in the form of plant locations; within each plant there are data silos and information spread all around the organization, but in opening up new plants, opens up new problems to face with insights. Each plant location is essentially its own data silo and does not share much information with other plants, unless inquired. Upper management is required to collect and piece together data from each silo within plant locations as well as piece together the plant silos to assist in not only reporting, but to make decisions on how to innovate their organization as a whole. With shallow insights and unconnected information, this can be a difficult and sometimes impossible task if you don’t have the right tools.
Solutions to silos:
Culture is and always will be the best starting point for taking on any new project to centralize data or when considering new tools to use for your processes. Centralizing data and its success will be primarily dependent on how well the culture commits to data centralization as well as how committed management is to eliminating data silos and/ or the project itself. Culture is at the top of the priority list when making these types of changes and management should always be as supportive as possible throughout the process to make sure that it is a success.
Data silos can be approached as an organization with other digital tools to help pull silos together or it can be done by the company itself. The main thing to remember with integrating silos (independently or between plants) is that centralization of data is a key aspect to getting deeper insight. Most commonly, organizations will create a data lake that will host and maintain data from different areas of the plant and/ or all plant locations. Essentially, it is a data repository that will hold all of your data for you in one place (cloud-based or physical server).
Once information is together and can be extracted, you will need digital tools or software to make sure it is useful. There is no payoff in centralizing data if there are no uses once it is centralized for the most part. Next comes integrating the data; integrating the data will allow you to filter, manage, and pull together the data you want to see for each department or plant location you desire. This helps to make granular decisions as well as high-level company decisions with your new integrated and centralized data.
There are a wide range of providers that can do one or the other and some that can do both very well.
Recap:
Step 1: Establish Successful Culture
Step 2: Create a Data Lake (sometimes this may be skipped, dependent on tools used)
Step 3: Utilize the Data with Digital Tools
You may also always do these processes internally with your team. Here are a few of our favorite tools to use here.
Benefits of integrating silos:
Once you’ve taken care of centralizing and integrating your data silos to be a cohesive unit, you can enjoy the benefits of deeper insight. Centralizing, integrating, and pulling these data silos together will ensure quality of products throughout your organization going to customers, save vast amounts of time in reporting and tracing data, as well as boosting the overall efficiency and profitability of your operations.
There are more benefits than just what you may see on the surface; many times companies see a spike in employee engagement, improved management strategies, and a boost in company or production innovations.
How to take action:
Taking action requires some work, so it can be difficult to begin these initiatives; especially if you don’t have a team to help or knowledge of how centralizing and integrating data works.
With BluWave Technologies’ proven process that takes our customers from paper to profitability, you can experience deeper level insight, time savings, and higher levels of achievement for your organization.
To explore our solutions or more information on how to approach these problems, please click here or call us today to talk about your personalized plans of action at (770) 356-6436.