Every day I talk to customers who want to get off paper. They spend an inordinate amount of operators’ time manually capturing data on paper, and then often double-down when they have someone transfer those paper check sheets into a digital spreadsheet. What they fail to realize is they are even further behind technology as we move from digitizing data collection to raw digital data from many different sources. Hourly checks turn into millisecond data streams. Startup inspections turn into a continuous flow of process data. The type and flow of data is increasing. How is a quality engineer supposed to stay on top of it all, make sense of it all, and continue to improve quality?
For each new data source, an exponential increase in processing occurs. Stream processing technology points to a new solution for increasing volume and variety of data. Parsing each event as it happens allows real-time processing and aggregation, making the data immediately accessible for process improvements, whether manual or automated, programmable or cognitive.