Enabling process improvements through visual performance indicators

Most modern production processes automatically generate volumes of rich data, including equipment states, material presentations, labor content, and quality non- conformances. Unfortunately, much of this data is either discarded immediately, or stored in its raw form in disparate data sources for subsequent review or reporting. Accessing the data in these systems often requires time-consuming transformations, filtering for relevancy and substantial latency, rendering the potential wealth of information useless to daily decision- makers on the factory floor. Without such information, individuals on the floor rely on heuristics, experience, and intuition to inform their decisions, often resulting in inefficiency and suboptimal solutions. This work explores the idea that decision-making can be improved through the automated transformation of data into information for real-time display on the factory floor. This thesis reviews the technology infrastructure components, evaluation metrics and presentation displays deployed at Raytheon Company that can not only characterize a current process, but also suggest opportunities for process improvement. Case studies illustrate the identification of a process issue, the investigation of root causes and improvement alternatives, and the evaluation of change efforts, all using visual performance indicators. Work for this thesis resulted in several interactive dashboards in the Microwave area that characterize the production process in terms of schedule, cost, and quality compliance, with additional tools to investigate non-conforming processes.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• McCaghren, Neville G. (Neville Gregory)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Roy E. Welsch and Duane S. Boning.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34848

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34848