OPEN Shorts – Driving by the Rearview Mirror

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Listen to this short video as Marshall Williams, our Founder and Chief Quality Engineer, discusses the ongoing challenges quality and procurement teams face with disparate and fragmented data sources.

Video Transcript

Hi everybody, Marshall with Open. I just want to talk a couple of minutes about driving while looking in your rearview mirror. When you think about it, probably not a great idea. It’s a great way to get where you’re not trying to go, which will almost certainly be an accident. So it’s really remarkable that this is how most businesses operate today.

Twenty-five years ago, when I started out my career in aerospace as a quality engineer, that’s just the way we did business. It was all paper, Excel, Word documents, PDFs, all that kind of stuff attached to emails. But it didn’t actually reside anywhere as part of a live integrated database that we could mine information from. Personally, at that time, that was my dream. I wanted to be able to do that kind of stuff, and now I get to. It’s really exciting.

It is still amazing that 25 years later, big companies are still having small armies of quality analysts and engineers collecting a lot of information from aggregated data sources. Pulling stuff out of records manually and putting it into an Excel spreadsheet or some kind of Access database to produce a report that’s two weeks old or three weeks old, or however old it is. We talk to a lot of people, and it doesn’t fail that at least a couple of times a month we come across somebody who says, “By the time I get all my reporting done, that data is a month old.” That’s driving while looking in your rearview mirror. You’re not back there anymore. You’re somewhere else. Those reports are no longer relevant.

So, you have to stop making excuses for that antiquated technology that doesn’t provide you with the relevance and the clarity you need to make the right decisions. You need to think differently. There are no more excuses. There are great technologies out there. Open has an amazing platform that helps you bring together all of that real-time information and actually make sense of it. So let us know, contact us. We can help you with that.