As someone involved in manufacturing, you’re probably tired of dealing with inefficiency issues and product defects that affect your bottom line. But what are you doing to solve these problems?

Consider this story: Walter, a Chief Operations Officer of a parts distributor and automotive electronics solutions company in Florida, recently visited several manufacturers to see if they could produce a device for his business. When he asked each project manager about their average Rolled Throughput Yield (RTY), only one had an answer. And this answer could be crucial to your business.

RTY: A Quick Rundown

RTY is often used in Six Sigma, the tools and techniques engineered by Motorola’s Bill Smith for business improvement in the 1980s. The official definition is “a process performance measure that provides insight into the cumulative effects of an entire process. RTY measures the yield for each of several process steps and provides the probability that a unit will come through that process defect free,” according to Lean Sigma Corporation.When you multiply both the yield and probability of defect together, it shows you the cumulative efficiency of your business, since you can see the losses you took along the way to a finished product.

Let’s get back to our buddy Walter — most of the managers he spoke to were concerned about how they repaired or disposed of broken units, which increased their production costs. A manager who calculated their RTY could determine dollar amounts on wasted materials at each step in their process, as well as address each of these problem spots with targeted improvement teams. The result would be a more streamlined testing process and a more efficient production line. This data can do more than tell you what’s wrong — it can help you discover how to make it right.

So, How Do We Get There?

We know you don’t want to have to calculate all this on your own. Using Business Intelligence (BI) software, you can create helpful visual dashboards that show data collected from each step of your manufacturing process. You can even program this information into the RTY equation so that you are always up to date on your efficiency and can spot any problems as they arise.

But that’s not all BI can do with your RTY data. There are multiple ways that you can use this information to pinpoint problems and streamline processes. Here are three business cases to help show you how you could get started.

1. Spotting Faulty Material:

Once you’ve spent a lot of time looking at your RTY data, you’ll be able to make general statements about where problem spots in your manufacturing process are — maybe it’s a specific part in the product that results in defects almost 50 percent of the time. However, you’re not sure how to correct this. After all, your product needs that part, so it’s not like you can just get rid of it and call it a day. When you place your data into BI software, though, you can add other information such as component origin, how long the component was in storage before being used, the temperature it was kept at, or even what specific machine or employee was assembling said component. In doing so, you could discover targetable issues in your manufacturing line that you can directly address to increase productivity.

2. Pinpoint Logistical Hold-Ups:

Each individual piece of your product has to come from somewhere, and tracing the logistics of how they all arrive on the production line is an exercise in mental gymnastics. If one component is going to be delayed, you can figure out how to address that. But what if that piece is consistently a little late during certain times of the year? Or if one of the parts is frequently early, or gets misplaced, or lost in route? This can damage your efficiency, and it will show in your RTY. Rather than relying solely on your experience to combat these issues, you can track patterns in logistical problems over time using BI dashboards. Thanks to predictive analysis features, you’ll have an educated, data-sourced assessment the next time you sense a logistical hold-up on the horizon.

3. Assess Improvement Over Time:

You start making changes to your business based on the data you collect thanks to RTY — but how can you prove that it’s really making an impact? You can create a BI dashboard that compares your RTY over weeks, months, or even years. You could also run RTY comparisons between different parts of your business to measure individual efficiency. That way, you know what changes specifically are making the most difference to your bottom line, and if you need to reassess any parts of your operation to ensure you’re maximizing profit.

Ready to get started? If you’d like to jumpstart your business with RTY metric analysis using BI software, be sure to check out Dyntell Bi software, our cost-effective business intelligence solution that allows for ease of use with cutting-edge technological capabilities. Sign up for a demo today.