Serious About Data-Driven Process Optimization? A CEO's Perspective

A friend recently posed a straightforward question to me about our industry as a whole: "Are companies serious about data-driven process optimization?”

It's a question every leader in the industrial space should be asking themselves. At Industrial Insight Inc., the answer is an emphatic “yes, WE are” but being serious about it as a manufacturing company means more than just talking the talk. It requires a fundamental shift in how you allocate resources and attention.

Beyond the Firefighting 

The core of my friend's follow-up question gets to the heart of the challenge: "Does your company have people dedicated to this task and essentially out of day-to-day firefighting?"

For many industrial plants, this is the biggest hurdle. Operational excellence teams, maintenance crews, and engineers are often trapped in a cycle of reactive work. They're too busy addressing the immediate crisis, the unplanned downtime and quality deviations, to step back and systematically analyze the root causes. It is a viscous circle of nothingness. 

To be truly serious about optimization, you need to deliberately insulate a core team. This dedicated group isn't just running reports; they're the architects of future efficiency. Their mandate is to leverage industrial data science and advanced analytics to identify non-obvious patterns, predict failures before they happen, and design fundamentally better processes. They need quality data, in context to even begin the journey, but almost no company has all this. 

The Industrial Insight Commitment

At Industrial Insight Inc., our entire business is built on this commitment. Our mission is to help industrial plants optimize operations, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. Some ways that we achieve this is not by adding to the firefighting, but by providing proactive solutions:

1. Data Analysis: Turning raw data from systems like the PI System and other data historians into actionable insights.

2. Business Intelligence: Empowering your organization with real-time insights and tools (like Power BI views) to ensure you're "fixing the right things."

3. Dedicated Support: Through our Solution Implementation and System Administration services, we ensure that your real-time and historical data environment runs smoothly and securely, freeing up your internal teams to focus on core operations rather than system maintenance. So many of our customers have lost experience in this area and are in desperate need, whether they realize it or not.

Yes, we need some of your team’s time to help us if you can’t commit a dedicated team to these tasks, but likely not as much as you think. 

If your data-driven initiatives are consistently stalled, consider reviewing the activities of the individuals responsible for these initiatives. If they are working on reactive items 90% of their time (or more), then your company is not serious about optimization, your company is only serious about surviving the day. Or, even worse, maybe your executives are just trying to survive this quarter with a fleeting, half-hearted eye toward the future.

We'd love to hear your thoughts. How has your company tackled the challenge of dedicating resources to proactive, data-driven improvement? What structures have you put in place to free your best minds from the daily grind?