So your team has been charged with selecting, purchasing and implementing a key manufacturing system like SPC. In addition to searching for qualified vendors, these teams are tasked with building a financial case for return on investment. They must construct a case and quantify financial gains from things like reduced scrap or more efficient use of machinery to pay for the new SPC implementation or other technology investments. In the drive to show that the savings cover the investment, what might be overlooked? Are there hard to quantify, intangible benefits that come from a data driven quality system? I believe there are significant intangible reasons to implement SPC across an enterprise. Reasons that, in the end, may be more important than those that are used to quantify the original investment. It is important that teams consider these “hard to quantify” benefits as part of a comprehensive understanding of the benefits of the entire project.
Here are four intangible benefits we see over and over.