Whether you manage operations with paper and pencil as in 1920 or use the state of the art in information technology (IT), you need clean data. If you don’t have it, you will suffer all sorts of dysfunctions. You will order materials you already have or don’t need, and be surprised by shortages. You will make delivery promises you can’t keep, and ship wrong or defective products. And you will have no idea what works and what doesn’t in your plant.

I have never seen a factory with perfect data, and perhaps none exists. Dirty data is the norm, not the exception, and the reason most factories are able to ship anything at all is that their people find ways to work around the defects in their data, from using expediters to find parts that aren’t where the system thought they were, to engineers who work directly with production to make sure a technical change is implemented. Mei-chen Lo, of Kainan University in Taiwan, proposed a useful classification of the issues with data quality. What I would like to propose here is pointers on addressing them.

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