This is one of those “big picture” issues. If your organization is large enough to have business units, divisions, or multiple locations, you are big enough to have silos of data and information. In “Stop the Profit Drain: Pull Data Across an Entire Organization” (IndustryWeek, October 9, 2009), Michael Newkirk talks about a company that has 16,000 process improvement software licenses, which has the potential to create 16,000 silos. “It nourishes an environment where thousands of engineers reinvent the wheel because all the meetings in the world can’t share best practices efficiently enough to keep that from happening,” Newkirk writes.

Such silos are not limited to manufacturing or business. The Baldrige Criteria ask how you align and integrate data and information to track daily operations and overall performance. In other words, how do you move it out of the silos and into the hands of anyone, anywhere in the organization, who could use it to improve performance?

Newkirk cites a Korean steelmaker that used Six Sigma to make incremental process improvements but sought a larger impact. “There were still large profit variables between plants and items and scrap losses were unacceptably high,” Newkirk notes. “Traditional, isolated process oriented analysis wasn’t sufficient.”

The steelmaker pulled all of its data together across plants and processes. The result? Scrap ratio cut from 15% to 1.5%, a 50% reduction in lead times for standard hot coil production, and an inventory reduction of 60%.

Newkirk identifies five capabilities you need to align and integrate your data, information, and knowledge across the organization:

• An up-to-the-minute, unified view of all relevant data. You need to integrate data, information, and knowledge to produce “one version of the truth.”
• A rigorous framework for historical analysis. You need processes for “testing and managing models and encoding business rules and criteria for analysis.”
• Tools for proactive analysis and action. Predictive analysis using in-process measures helps you catch errors and defects during the process rather than waiting to react at the end.
• A living archive of collective knowledge. You need processes for collecting and transferring workforce knowledge and for rapidly identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices.
• Knowledge available to all stakeholders. Data, analysis, and knowledge need to be transferred within the workforce and to leaders, customers, suppliers, partners, and collaborators.

You can see these capabilities in action in the application summaries of Baldrige Award recipients. For example, the application by Cargill Corn Milling (CCM), which won the Award in 2008, states that “the Mill-Feed Product Development Group team works with Cargill Sweeteners Europe to collect, transfer, and share best practices for mill and feed operations for 31 worldwide mills.” CCM also shares best practices through its Centers of Expertise, which “are formal internal groups focused on specific process areas and charged with the responsibility of transferring knowledge for use within CCM.”

If you are large enough to have created silos of data, information, and knowledge, you are large enough to need formal, systematic processes to break them down, making it easy for those who can benefit from the data, information, and knowledge to get it.

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