Three steps make pilot projects work: set a performance baseline before you start, decide if you're just validating the technology or actually driving improvements, and change how people work with the new data. A Fitbit tracks your weight, but you won't lose pounds without changing your habits.
First of all, as you're beginning, make sure that you establish a baseline of what the performance was before you began so that you can then go back and compare and contrast to say that, yes, this did make things better. Now, one of the things to focus on as you're doing that initial implementation or that initial pilot is, are you just trying to prove out whether the technology works or are you actually trying to drive improvements during that pilot? Because you may be doing the pilot just to show that the technology works, and in that case, you're probably not going to drive a lot of performance increase as you do that. Because to drive the performance increase, not only do you have to capture the data and be able to display that and so forth, you have to change the behaviors of people, you have to change the process to take advantage of those new capabilities in order to actually see those benefits. The comparison I use all the time is a Fitbit. I can wear the Fitbit, I can capture all the data, I can see all the pretty charts and graphs, but if I don't change my behaviors, I'm not going to lose any weight. And it's the same thing on the shop floor. You can put these things in place, you can do all the right things, the technology can work perfectly, but if you don't do anything with that information, then you're not going to see any performance increases.
