Zura Labs enables a global leader to improve data quality and data integrity by 95%

Transforming data for an automotive manufacturer

An automotive components and systems manufacturer, a global leader in extruded rubber products and sealing systems, wanted to transform its manufacturing plant data into insight and knowledge. The main objective was to make consolidated data available to top-level management for better decision-making, and to save production costs.

Integrating data from every plant into a single view

The client collects large volumes of data daily from multiple plants across North and Central America, for all three shifts. Each plant has multiple work-units: body sealing, rubber extruding and more, categorized as automated or manual.

Operators enter Count Point Paper Work (CPPW) as they manufacture parts. Supervisors then re-enter that data into a “production line report” for each shift: Excel files with many spreadsheets, often above 20 MB.

What we observed

• Data was captured manually, leading to many data quality and integrity issues, and each plant’s spreadsheet format varied.
• More than 100 working units across all plants, each running three shifts a day, made analysis tedious if not impossible.
• Integrating data from all plants into a single standard to evaluate Direct Cost to Production (DCP) efficiency against plant efficiency was a challenge.
• Fragmented spreadsheets in different formats made it hard to draw insights that would improve efficiency and reduce scrap.

Zura Labs solution

We integrated data from all plants into a Business Intelligence solution that could:

• Present executive dashboards with drill-down to each working unit’s operation-level information.
• Streamline production line reports for mid-management.
• Identify complications and breakdowns of working units at each plant.
• Track underperforming working units monthly and daily.
• Track working unit performance to set stretch goals.
• Track Direct Cost to Production (DCP) for each working unit.

Key benefits

Zura Labs helped the client develop a hosted BI solution using Cognos, customizable to senior management’s needs for viewing operations across multiple plants, with visually compelling dashboards and reports that work on iPad and mobile.

The 95% improvement in data quality and integrity came from providing supervisors with a log of data issues found in the spreadsheets, so they could easily find and fix inaccuracies.