Lean Manufacturing Training Seminars 

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BEST MANUFACTURING PRACTICES BULLETIN

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Competitive Knowledge for Manufacturing People 
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October 18, 2004

Hi, welcome back. 

Many years ago Vince Lombardi led the Green Bay 
Packers football team to unprecedented success by 
having an almost obsessive focus on doing the BASICS 
very well. 

Like Vince Lombardi, who focused his championship 
teams on the mastering of football basics, we need 
to focus our teams on the mastering of manufacturing 
basics.

When it comes to improving manufacturing performance, 
"Information Integrity" is a crucial manufacturing 
basic. I call it “INFOTEGRITY” - the ability to 
communicate data and documentation completely, 
accurately and in a TIMELY MANNER. 

To maintain ones competitive edge, management's focus 
must be shifted from systems sophistication to systems 
Infotegrity. That said, its time to put the "horse 
before the cart". 

Information Integrity is no panacea, however, I'm 
convinced that a company with unsophisticated, 
lean systems and first-rate Infotegrity will 
outperform a company that has sophisticated systems 
and second-rate Infotegrity. What about those 
companies that have mastered both? I buy their stock!

If your company is having trouble with data accuracy,
documentation quality, report credibility, and the 
timely availability of information, be sure to read 
this week's bulletin, INFORMATION INTEGRITY, “A 
requisite to first-rate manufacturing performance.” 

Have a nice day, keep the faith, and stay connected.

Bill Gaw
Business Basics, LLC
Bg@bbasicsllc.com
760-945-5596

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INFORMATION INTEGRITY
“A requisite to first-rate manufacturing performance.” 


MRPII/ERP System objectives cannot be achieved when 
day-to-day production and manufacturing control systems 
are driven by inaccurate, untimely and uncontrolled 
data and/or documentation.

If your company is typical, you’ll find that converting 
the monthly financial forecast into reality still 
requires overtime, costly expediting, expensive "on-
the-run" product changes and even a little "smoke and 
mirrors". With all the available sophisticated 
computerized systems, why is it so?

The answer lies in what’s missing and has nothing to 
do with the quality of the system designs. Like Vince 
Lombardi, who focused his team on the mastering of 
football basics – we need to focus our teams on the 
mastering of business basics. There are 8-Basics of
Kaizen Based Lean Manufacturing, and when it comes 
to manufacturing performance, "Information Integrity" 
is the most important. 

We call it "Infotegrity" – the ability to communicate 
data and documentation completely, accurately and in a 
timely manner. Like blocking and tackling in football, 
it’s not glamorous and few want to do it – but without 
tenacious and flawless continuous improvement and 
execution, manufacturing performance can never be 
optimized. 

Data accuracy is crucial to computerized master 
scheduling and Material Requirement Planning (MRP)
computations. Second-rate Infotegrity is usually 
the root cause for nervous requirements that create 
excessive shop and purchase order reschedules. Both
produce costly factory chaos. 

To improve the quality of MRP "rescheduling" messages, 
one materials manager focused on improving the integrity 
of MRP inputs. She reduced the frequency of their MRP 
"re-generation" and implemented a mandatory weekly 
review/purge/reset of all purchase and production "open" 
order status. The results were amazing; reschedule 
messages were reduced by 85% and her planner/buyers 
gained time to do additional proactive parameter 
maintenance. Because of increased scheduling stability, 
there was a significant improvement in both supplier 
and shop on-time deliveries. 

A good example of the importance of Infotegrity is the 
"eye-opening" result of the cumulative effect of data 
inputs in a computerized order release and scheduling 
system such as MRP. There are at least ten data input 
files that drive such systems with data accuracy 
varying between 90% and 100%. 

Statistically, their cumulative effect (the product of 
their values) could yield a devastating, order release 
accuracy of 68.2%. That translates into a cumulative 
31.8% error rate in the order release and scheduling 
process. In spite of this huge constraint, American 
ingenuity and energy still gets the job done – BUT AT 
WHAT COSTS? 

Although many business gurus have identified data 
accuracy as important in the implementation of 
computerized systems, their message has been lost in 
the mania of systems sophistication. To remain 
competitive in the future, manufacturers must improve 
the results gained from their manufacturing operations.
To do this, the fine-tuning of Infotegrity is a "must do". 
How does a company accomplish this task? Here are a few 
challenges:

* simplify data bases – making it easy and routine to 
keep data correct and up to date,
* "bulletproof" system parameter maintenance – helping 
to eliminate mistakes,
* streamline and discipline the product documentation 
process – doing it right the first time,
* real time auditing and corrective actions – keeping 
information current and correct,
* employ the right tools – bar coding, back-flushing, 
EDI and the internet,
* establish the right mindset – the quality of 
decision-making is dependent on Infotegrity.

Foreign competition is getting tougher and tougher as 
each year passes. If we don’t want our competitors to 
close in on our markets, we need to continuously improve 
product/service quality, increase productivity, lower 
costs and increase speed of new product introductions. 

To maintain ones competitive edge, management’s focus 
must be shifted from developing systems sophistication 
to improving manufacturing Infotegrity. 

If you feel your company needs help with improving 
the integrity of their data and documentation, I have
prepared an exclusive INFORMATION INTEGRITY e-learning 
CD for our MB&BP bulletin subscribers. Check it out at:

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Manufacturing Knowledge you’ll not find at offsite 
seminars nor in the books at Amazon.com

Lean Manufacturing - Balanced Scorecard 
ISO 9000:2000 - Strategic Planning - Supply Chain 
Management - MRP Vs Lean Exercises - Kaizen Blitz 
Lean Six Sigma - Value Stream Mapping

All at one Website: Good Manufacturing Practices

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