It was a productive week across both Visual Decisions sites. The headline changes:
- mfg-surveys.com picked up multi-plant organizational support, an anonymity-by-default privacy floor, and a softer entry-point assessment.
- mfgusecases.com picked up Use Case Families (a new way to slice the corpus across departments), a combined knowledge graph for Pro saved lists, and a substantially expanded KPI catalog.
Three themes worth pulling out before the highlights.
New ways to slice the data. Both platforms added structural dimensions for cross-cutting views. On mfg-surveys, that's multi-plant: a single company can now be modeled as Corporate → optional Division → Plant, with each plant getting its own assessments and membership but rolling up to a tree-wide view. On mfgusecases, that's Families: 17 cross-departmental conceptual groupings that surface use cases related by topic regardless of which department owns each one. Different platforms, parallel structural moves.
Better cross-cutting analysis. The mfg-surveys multi-plant view aggregates members, completions, gaps, assignments, and the maturity heatmap across the parent and every child plant — corporate admins see the whole tree without tab-switching. On mfgusecases, Pro users now see a Combined Knowledge Graph tab on saved lists, which rolls up canonical causes, enablers, KPIs, and value leaks across every use case in the list. Aggregated influence-score edges surface the strongest patterns at the portfolio level.
Improved on-ramps. mfg-surveys shipped a new Manufacturing Impact Assessment — a 28-question CESMII-aligned diagnostic designed as a quick first read, not requiring department expertise. mfgusecases moved the Key Metrics and Financial Metrics sections from the registered-user-only Analysis tab to the public Overview tab, so anyone evaluating the platform can see what metric coverage looks like before signing up.
Highlights — mfg-surveys.com
- Multi-plant org support. Plants section on Company Settings, targeted invites that send invitees to the right plant, tree-wide rollup of admin views, plant breadcrumbs everywhere your company name appears. Existing single-location customers don't have to do anything; the option is there when you want it.
- Anonymity-by-default with k-anonymity. A new minimum-group-size threshold (default 5, configurable to 3 or 10) means departments below the threshold never display individual rows in the maturity heatmap. Per-cell suppression for sparse data. Gap analysis hides individual flagger names. Nobody on your platform — admin, peer, or stranger — can see what you specifically answered.
- Manufacturing Impact Assessment. 28 questions across the 6 CESMII Smart Manufacturing key areas. Lives in a new Targeted Diagnostics program, separate from the deeper department maturity assessments. Useful as an introduction or a high-level signal on where to focus.
- Preview Questions on every assessment. A public page reachable from each assessment card showing the full pillar / subsection / question hierarchy without scale clutter, so you can see what you're getting into before committing.
Smaller polish: a /surveys programs index, search/filter/sort on program pages, save-and-exit messaging clarity, mobile menu fix, Gmail address aliasing, invite-to-unregistered-users flow, cascade integrity on question edits, city autocomplete (33,000+ cities).
Highlights — mfgusecases.com
- Use Case Families. 17 cross-departmental conceptual families covering the full corpus, replacing the Associated Functions filter in the browse sidebar. New family chip on each use case page, clickable to surface every related use case across departments. The Guide page on site organization now documents Family alongside the other seven dimensions.
- Combined knowledge graph for saved lists (Pro). Aggregated graph view across all use cases in a saved list, with canonical causes/enablers/KPIs consolidated to the canonical level and influence-score edges aggregated. Surfaces the strongest patterns at portfolio level. Works on shared lists too.
- Expanded KPI catalog. 38 new canonical metrics across 8 new strategic goal areas. Highlights: OEE decomposition (Availability, Performance, Quality, TEEP), Decision Cycle Time and other process-velocity metrics, Daily Management & Lean practice indicators, Finance Operations metrics (Month-End Close Cycle Time and friends), Cyber & Digital Risk, Workplace Wellbeing (Workers' Comp per FTE, Grievance Rate), Material Waste split (Conversion Waste, Material Yield Rate). The L2 hierarchy went from 36 to 44 strategic goal areas under 8 L1 goals.
- Metrics visible to anonymous users. Key Metrics and Financial Metrics moved from the Analysis tab to the Overview tab. Anyone considering an account can now see metric coverage on each use case.
- "Most Popular" is the new default browse sort. Powered by a daily refresh job pulling 30-day view counts from the activity log.
Smaller polish: branded OpenGraph image for social previews, process area as primary label across saved lists / AI Finder / admin analytics / newsletter / PDF exports / user activity / team stats / Q&A views (sixteen-plus places now consistently the conceptual scope first), updated Guide reflecting Family as the eighth navigation dimension.
Where the two platforms connect
The two sites work together at the data layer. Survey questions on mfg-surveys generate the structured value-leak signals that mfgusecases turns into use cases. A small but consequential fix this week: when an admin edits a question on mfg-surveys, the matching value-leak text on mfgusecases now syncs through correctly — scoped to the same use case as the question's subsection, with an opt-in checkbox if the admin wants the change applied across other surveys with identical text. Previously, the cascade fanned out to every department where the question appeared, including unrelated ones.
If you're a customer using both — running plant assessments on mfg-surveys to identify gaps and then exploring mfgusecases for use cases addressing those gaps — both sides got more reliable this week.
Coming soon, both sides
- mfg-surveys: right-to-erasure flow, a public privacy notice page, plant management actions (edit/remove a plant, switch admin context across plants from a single page).
- mfgusecases: filter audit on Industry / Competitive Advantage / Stakeholder Groups, taxonomy reconciliation actions from this week's clustering work, and a Topics dimension capturing rank-2/3 family classifications as cross-cutting practice tags.
Questions, feedback, or want to chat about whether either platform fits your operation? Reply to this email — we read everything.
— Tim Stuart, Visual Decisions