Five Steps to Realizing a More Effective Data Foundation

In order to make more informed reliability decisions, you need to ensure that you are looking at the right data. How do you determine what the right data is? How can you use the data you’re currently collecting to implement a more effective data foundation at your facility? Here are five steps to get started on your journey to making the right decisions with the right data:

1. Understand Program Vision

Your program vision should outline and identify what you are looking to gain from the program and how it aligns with your goals. Having a program vision helps the team prioritize what is most important in the quest to achieve your data goals.

Benefit: Allows you to save time, money, and resources by helping to focus your program.

2. Ensure Accuracy of Data to Field

It is vital that the data you have collected and entered into your systems matches what data you have in the field to ensure that you are not duplicating efforts by cleaning and organizing the wrong data.

Benefit: Gives confidence that the decisions made from the data are correct.

3. Define Data Formatting

Data formatting, including naming conventions, how information is displayed, and how information is communicated, is crucial to ensuring the data is speaking the same language to different groups within your organization.

Benefit: Builds consistency and lays a foundation, making it easier to implement and maintain programs with more structured data.

4. Outline Methods to Gather Data

The methods you use to gather data should answer why you want to gather the data and what the benefit of gathering the data is. These methods should also provide insight into what data directly or indirectly affects potential problems.

Benefit: Provides focused use of limited resources to gain the most benefit from your resources.

5. Make Better Decisions

The data you collect should ultimately facilitate better reliability decisions by providing facility health, future projections, and ways in which you can improve.

Benefit: Lays a foundation that enables you to continually learn from and update your programs as strategies are implemented and new data becomes available.