The strengths of Panoratio’s platform also lends itself to custom data quality and analysis projects that can either serve as a data audit for existing data management solutions or as the preliminary step of a PANOsight implementation.

DQA - Data Quality Assurance - Consulting Package

Data Quality Assurance (DQA): Analysis is only as effective as the consistency and quality of the data it is based upon. We often come across companies that, prior to kicking of a Business Intelligence implementation, desire to assess the quality of their existing data.

Beginning with a an initial scoping workshop, Panoratio’s consultants will, together with their counterparts at the customer, review the structure and data content of existing source systems. Therefore a PDI set is modelled to analyse content and structure of the data source. This initial PDI set provides the basis for business workshops intended to determine what information is actually needed from the analytical system for the most critical data-sensitive processes.

These collaborative workshops result in an agreed-upon ‘optimal’ data structure based on prioritized business processes. New PDIs are generated according to these specs, are used to point out data quality issues that affect those critical processes and ultimately result in a list of corrective actions.

At the end of the DQA Consulting module, the corrective actions identified have been implemented, demonstrating quick wins within the customer organization. At this point, a high level of data quality valuation and assurance is evident, providing an optimal point to either initiate a new or reconfigure an existing data quality assurance programm.

Generally speaking, Six Sigma projects are defined through the various phases the methodology proscribes, often referred to as DMAIC – Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control.

Panoratio’s software solution has clearly proven it’s value in four of these phases:

Measure: This phase is structured around the preparation of various metrics that will serve as a framework for the project. These are based on available data and usually involve additional data collection activities and sampling. A sample is a subset of the total amount of data available and is usually used because measuring an entire ‚population‘ is either too difficult or prohibitlively expensive. It’s a convenience, but one prone to error – it introduces bias, involves the loss of potentially useful data and represents results that are estimates only, often with no more than 85% certainty.

Using Panoratio at this critical early stage of a Six Sigma project means that the measures derived from it will be based on an accounting of all existing data and represent true results, not estimations.

Analyze: This phase analyses defects by studying possible modes of failure and utilizing cause and effect and root cause approaches.  It establishes a clear picture of how effective processes currently being utilized are and how they are connected to overal company goals.

Obviously, the consequence of failing to analyze data well, and in its entirety, are faulty conclusions, inappropriate solutions and, ultimately, wasted resources. Panoratio enables all-encompassing root-cause analysis through in-memory click-mining. This provides automatic detection of significant variations between selections across all dimensions and records, segmentation of target groups on the fly and maintains all levels of data granularity.

Improve: This phase essentially operationalizes the data collection, metrics development and analysis done in prior phases. The project team applies its improvement hypotheses to critical processes.

Verifying these improvement hypotheses once they have been implemented shows what kind of progress has been made. Panoratio, with it’s relative time axis, linear regression and optimization capabilities, is an invaluable addition here. 

Control: Finally, the techniques used for process improvement in the preceding phases are monitored. Techniques around time-frame comparisons are put in place to ensure that the methodology has been successfully implemented.

Gains won after implementing improvements need to be understood and maintained.  Panoratio can be used as a powerful dashboard controlling mechanism, as our technology can process huge amounts of output data in near real-time and present those results using ODBO integration to existing dashboarding tools. Furthermore, it is also possible to benchmark current process behavior towards historical reference patterns and detect “suspicious” or out-of-expected-range results by easily comparing huge volumes of current and historical data.

Please contact our expert for more details:

sixsigma(at)panoratio.com