As winter approaches, I find myself thinking about hockey and the minor league team I enjoy watching. Before each game, the arena fires up the video board and starts a countdown:
10… 9… 8… 7…
And every single time, the crowd starts counting along.
You see the same thing with rocket launches, New Year’s Eve, and just about anywhere else someone puts a big countdown on a screen. Apparently, as humans, we are nearly incapable of seeing a countdown without joining in. There’s an interesting lesson in that.
Visual information drives behavior.
A countdown takes a piece of data (how much time is left) and turns it into an action (start counting).
The same principle applies on a manufacturing floor. We can collect enormous amounts of data about production, quality, downtime, schedules, inventory, and performance. But if that information is locked away in a database, spreadsheet, ERP system, or some other data source, it may not be doing much to influence what happens on the floor.
That’s a big part of why we built DataCaster.
DataCaster takes data from existing sources and makes it visible on the TVs and displays where people are actually working. The value of data isn’t simply that you have it.
The value comes when people can see it, understand it, and act on it.
Maybe it isn’t quite as exciting as a hockey arena counting down to puck drop, but putting the right information in front of the right people can have a pretty meaningful impact on what happens next.