Until this week, every company on mfg-surveys.com was a single entity. That's fine for a single-site manufacturer — but our first multi-plant customer onboarded last week with seven facilities spread across three countries, and the flat model didn't fit how they actually wanted to baseline their operations.
Multi-plant support is now live. A company can be modeled as Corporate → (optional) Division → Plant, with each plant getting its own assessment data, its own membership, and its own location. A few user-visible pieces of this:
- Plants section on the Company Settings page lets a corporate admin add child plants with name, country, state, city, and employee count. Industry segments inherit from the parent automatically.
- Targeted invites — when sending an invite, admins now pick which plant the invitee will join. The invitee lands at the right plant on accept. No more "I joined the wrong row" cleanup.
- Tree-wide rollup — when a corporate admin views Company Settings, members, invites, completions, gaps, assignments, and the maturity heatmap aggregate across the parent and every child plant in one place. No tab-switching between facilities.
- Plant breadcrumbs — wherever your company name shows up (the company page, the survey-take screen, results pages, the account page), you now see the full chain: Acme Corp › Round Lake Foundry. The user knows which plant they're assessing, and corporate admins know which row they're looking at.
- Joining policy, your call — by default, multi-plant orgs are invite-only. A new toggle on Company Settings lets an admin opt in to letting employees self-pick a plant during onboarding when they search for the company.
Existing single-location customers don't have to do anything. Your entry stays exactly as it is. If and when you want to model multiple plants, the option is there.
New privacy floor: anonymity-by-default
Survey honesty depends on respondents trusting that their individual answers stay private. We've now made that a hard rule across the platform, not just a promise.
- Aggregated views only. The Company Maturity Heatmap was previously per-user (a row per respondent with their scores). It's now aggregated by department. No individual row, no individual scores.
- k-anonymity threshold. A new "Minimum group size" setting on Company Settings (default 5, configurable to 3 or 10) defines how many contributors a department needs before its row appears. Departments below the threshold fold into an "Other" bucket. If "Other" itself doesn't reach the threshold, the smallest qualifying department gets absorbed into Other, and the combined row is renamed — so no group of identifiable size is ever displayed by name.
- Per-cell protection. Even within a qualifying department, a single cell (department × pillar) only displays a value when at least N people contributed. Sparse cells render as a dash, not a number that could be reverse-engineered.
- Gap analysis suppression. Priority gaps with fewer than N respondents are now hidden from the top-gaps list, and we removed the "who flagged this" tooltip that previously showed individual names.
- Consistent messaging. A privacy banner on the registration page and an updated tip during the survey itself remind users that individual answers aren't shared with their company — only aggregated views are.
The shorter version: nobody on your platform — admin, peer, or stranger — can see what you specifically answered. That's the floor.
A softer entry point: Manufacturing Impact Assessment
Last week we shipped a 28-question diagnostic organized around the six CESMII Smart Manufacturing key areas — Strategy & Leadership, Excellence & Culture, Data-Driven Processes, System Infrastructure & Integration, Optimizing People, and Supply Chain Resiliency & Agility.
It lives in a new program called Targeted Diagnostics, separate from the deeper department maturity assessments. It's designed as a softer first step: organization-wide, a quick read, no department expertise required. Useful if you want a high-level signal on where to focus, or if you want to introduce the platform to a leader who isn't yet ready to do an 8-pillar deep dive.
The homepage CTAs reflect the new structure: "Take the Quick Assessment" leads to the Manufacturing Impact one; "Browse Department Assessments" sends you to the deep ones.
Preview before you take any survey
Every assessment now has a public Preview Questions page reachable from its card. It shows the full pillar / subsection / question hierarchy in a one-level accordion, with no Likert options or scale clutter — just the questions themselves so you can see what you're getting into before committing.
Useful for anyone deciding whether to take a survey, or for sharing the structure with a colleague who'll take it next.
Smaller but worth knowing
/surveysprograms index — a new top-level page lists every program (Start Here, Targeted Diagnostics, Smart Manufacturing Maturity) in one place. The "Assessments" link in the header now lands there.- Search, filter, and sort on program pages — when a program has more than a few assessments, you'll see a search box, status filter pills (All / Not started / In progress / Completed), and a sort dropdown.
- Save & Exit clarity — the in-survey tip now reminds you that you can save and exit any time without losing progress.
- Cards / List toggle on the assessments grid (shipped late April, still worth highlighting) — switch to List view if you prefer a denser, scannable layout.
- Mobile menu — the header now has a hamburger menu on phones and tablets, with the same nav items as desktop. (Embarrassing fix to a real gap; flagged it, fixed it, moving on.)
Behind the scenes
- Gmail address aliasing. Invites sent to
t.imdstuart@gmail.comno longer get rejected when the recipient signs up astimdstuart@gmail.com. We now normalize Gmail dot variants and+suffixtags before comparing, so invite matching survives provider quirks. - Invite-to-unregistered-users flow. If you invite someone who doesn't have an account, they now sail through register → email verification → first login and land back on the invite-acceptance page. Previously the invite token was orphaned during email verification.
- Question-edit cascade integrity. When admins edit a survey question, the new wording syncs down to the matching value-leak text on mfgusecases.com. Until this week, that cascade fanned out across every department a question was mapped to — even unrelated ones. It's now scoped to the same use case as the question's subsection, with an opt-in checkbox if the admin wants to apply across other surveys with identical text.
- City lookup. Onboarding and Company Settings now have a debounced autocomplete for city names backed by 33,000+ cities from GeoNames. Diacritics are tolerated (typing "sao" finds "São Paulo"), and there's a free-text fallback for cities not in the list.
Coming soon
- Right-to-erasure flow — a user-driven path for requesting deletion of their responses, with the resulting recompute of any aggregated views.
- Privacy notice page — a public page spelling out the policy in detail, including the k-anonymity threshold and how cross-border data transfer is handled.
- Plant management actions — editing a plant's settings, removing one, and switching admin context between plants from a single page.
Questions, feedback, or want to chat about whether this fits your operation? Reply to this email — we read everything.
— Tim Stuart, Visual Decisions