Wants Yesterday's Data? (You Do)

Accuracy, unfortunately, is not an absolute. Manufacturing systems commonly fail to feed production-line information into corporate data warehouses, where it could be kept to trace bad products or bad ingredients down the road, says Fernando Gonzalez, CIO of Byer California, a $US300 million clothing company. Gonzalez has managed IT at aerospace, medical device and chemical companies before coming to Byer, and has been involved in several recalls, including one of railroad car room deodorizers contaminated by bacteria.

"If you can't tell it was this production line on this shift on these days," Gonzalez says, "then you're stuck with an estimate and doing an expensive recall just to be safe."

Manufacturing execution systems, such as packages from Atos Origin or Manugistics, keep that kind of data. SmartOps offers a supply chain dashboard that managers inside and outside the factory can use to watch manufacturing activity and be alerted to problems, such as failures in quality control.

On the deodorizer recall, Gonzalez's company could trace the offending ingredient back to a supplier in the UK. But that supplier didn't keep records to show whether the raw materials had come in contact with other ingredients. "All we could do was assume that everything from the UK supplier was contaminated," he says, adding that the recall cost "several million dollars".

Sometimes data isn't stored long enough or outside companies hired to manage your warehouses or ship your products don't retain their data as long as you do. Barkai, at Manufacturing Insights, remembers wanting to study one year of supply chain activities at a US auto maker. "I was told I would not be able to receive [the data] because they had limited server space, so they purged it," he says. "Someone decided six months was good enough."

When deciding how long to hold data, factor in the product's life span, as well as any local health department requirements, federal antiterrorism legislation and the potential for litigation if something goes wrong, recommends a data security manager at ConAgra, who asked not to be named. He said data collection during a recall is "an arduous task" at the company, but "not a scramble". (For more tips, see "How to Turn the Tide", end of story.)