Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

KPI Alignment: Data Governance for Organizational Success

29 Aug 2025 · 2 min

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1:57

In this presentation, the speaker highlights the pervasive problem of KPI inconsistency caused by disparate calculations and data exports across systems, which erodes trust in metrics. He illustrates the issue with a firearms manufacturer that, despite having only nine plants, relied on 57 separate quality data sources spanning testing, inspection, and SPC systems. The speaker also debunks the misconception that all quality data resides in SAP, revealing the hidden complexity of data silos. He then outlines a solution: consolidating these varied sources into a common data store, establishing unified KPI definitions, standardized calculations, and robust data governance. This approach enables reliable, organization‑wide reporting, improves cross‑functional collaboration, and delivers a significant win for the business.

Chapters

I don't know about anybody else, but I've walked into an awful lot of meetings where people are talking about the same KPI, but they're using different numbers for it because they've exported information from one system into Excel. They're doing their own calculations and they're coming up with their own numbers for, you know, what OEE is or anything else. And so there becomes a lot of distrust of you know, the underlying information. And reporting is kind of an opportunity to work together as a team to define what those KPIs are, how they should be calculated, what the sources of information should be for those, and work together to create reporting across those different areas. I've seen some projects where just within the OT side, Things were a mess. Working with a firearms manufacturer, I was charged with creating a corporate dashboard for quality, and they only had 9 plants, but we uncovered 57 different data sources for quality information between testing systems, inspection systems, SPC, etc. Wow. And when I talked to IT about it, and asked them where all the quality data was, they said, oh, it's all in SAP. And when I finished laughing, I was like, okay, really? Where is it? And so forth. But being able to then take those different systems, take that information, put that into a common data store, and have that information now be accessible to the different people in the organization that should have access to it, and driving that data governance, driving those common definitions and so forth, and common calculations is something that created a large win for that organization. Wow.