There are some amazing painting by number kits available in the market today. Interestingly the concept was first introduced in the 16th century by Michelangleo to assign sections of his ceiling masterpieces to students to paint; pre-numbering each section to avoid mistakes. In isolation these sections seem not to make sense, but as a come together, they complete the whole picture beautifully.
Within manufacturing, the use of part numbers and bill of materials deliver a similar outcome to ensure consistency and repeatability. Services use procedures and checklists to ensure compliance. And for all the above, the goal is to standardize, manage and quality control outputs, as well as leveling-up productivity.
Heads Up: My Digital Opinion
Maintaining data quality is one of the biggest challenges within organizations, particularly rapidly growing organizations. This observation is not a commonly shared view, yet digitalization is often positioned as a silver bullet in magically solving organizations quality challenges. This over simplifies the underlying effort and work needed to define, structure and cleanse data that organizations can confidently trust.
For example, much of our Spend Analytics data accuracy relies on individuals entering and creating purchase requisitions correctly. If these inputs are free text, mainly descriptive, and open ended, inputs will absolutely vary dependent on the individual entering the dataset, and despite normalization (either via initial data screening, scrubbing or future use of RPA and AI applications); they will not be considered reliable enough to trust without further manual touch and investigation. If it is not 100% at the get-go, we need to check!
Where items can be procured via catalog and/or using a part list, these part number codifications deliver the confidence that the purchase is what it says it is, and supports an apple to apple analysis and baseline. Unfortunately not all businesses are that clear cut.
The question is how can we structure inputs, particularly in the acquisition of services, to improve the output. User training itself is not the solution. There are strategies that require collaboration with Finance (Chart of Accounts), Operations (Maintenance Schedules), Construction (Bill of Quantity), Accounts Payable (Invoices) etc. that redefine and reshape data entry to create more end to end codification, using guided assistance and part numbers (and variations thereof) to deliver a win/win. As with painting by numbers, in isolation, this may not make sense to those that are involved in a process subset, however if you trying to paint without numbers (and digitally operate) you are likely to struggle in delivering the picture you envisaged (artist skills aside!!).
AYSCO CONSULTING 