J.P. Morgan's September global manufacturing PMI just hit 53.0 — its highest since February 2022, with factory production growing at its fastest pace since July 2021.
Most plant owners could tell you their output is up. Far fewer could tell you, off the top of their head, where the margin on that output went.
That gap is the whole story of this newsletter.
Data you have: production logs, ERP entries, spreadsheets, machine readouts, utility bills. It exists. It has existed for years.
Data you use: a number you check before a decision. A trend that changes what you do on Tuesday.
Most plants have the first kind in abundance and the second kind in almost none. The logs get filed. The spreadsheets get updated. The bills get paid. And when a line bleeds — scrap creeping up two points, a machine stopping for twelve unlogged minutes a day — nobody sees it, because nobody put the data where a decision could find it.
This is not a software problem. New dashboards sit on top of the same unread logs. The fix is dumber and harder: pick the five numbers that decide your margins, pull them from what you already record, and look at them every week.
Data you have is an archive. Data you use is a habit. The plants that make money know which one they're sitting on.
If this was useful, forward it to one person who runs a plant.