ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the gathering of process data including management reports with financial and operational data, process maps, floor layouts, and similar sources of information to conduct an analysis of the root causes of process issues. The analytical tools discussed in this chapter will also help a team identify relationships between input or independent variables and output or dependent variables. The chapter discusses the data collection strategies as well as several tools and methods for analyzing data. The focus is on the standardization of process mapping, virtualization of these maps to align them to analytical tools that map data flows through IT systems. Metadata are the data fields containing actual data. An example is a customer name field that is updated with a new customer name. An organization will have hundreds, thousands of metadata fields containing information from marketing, sales, design, production, fulfillment, services, and other organizational teams.
