What's New Across Visual Decisions This Week (May 17, 2026)

A public Sample Report on mfg-surveys, a symptom-driven entry point on mfgusecases, and a sitewide feedback channel across both

Headline features on both sides. mfg-surveys.com got a public Sample Report — fully populated, no signup required — that finally lets visitors see what the platform produces before they take an assessment. mfgusecases.com got Diagnose — a symptom-driven entry point that walks visitors from a KPI or department through likely root causes to the use cases that address them. Plus a sitewide Feedback button on every page of both sites, and a tighter integration between the two when you finish a multi-part assessment.

Highlights — mfg-surveys.com

The Sample Report. Fully populated example at mfg-surveys.com/demo/exampleco, linked from the home page and main nav. ExampleCo is a fictional five-plant manufacturer (~215 users, ~840 completed assessments) with each plant deliberately shaped to surface a different diagnostic pattern: Boise as the mature leader, Topeka trading Quality for throughput, Waco showing a standard-work governance problem across four departments, Dayton excellent at quality but throughput-constrained, York friendly-but-mediocre with soft accountability across the org chart. Data is fictional but the patterns are real. Useful for anyone evaluating the platform or walking a prospect through what the deliverable actually looks like.
Executive Summary at the top of every report. Plant, division, and corporate reports now lead with a narrative synthesis (hand-written per ExampleCo plant; Claude-generated and cached for real customers via "Generate AI synthesis"), a list of recommended use cases derived from the priority gaps and linking through to mfgusecases.com, and a clear next-step CTA. The report says what it means, not just shows the data.
Materially better heatmap. Multi-part templates (Maintenance Pts 1+2, OpEx Pts 1+2, Materials Pts 1+2, Plant IT/OT Pts 1+2) now combine into one column per department. Rotated single-tier column headers, worst-to-best column ordering left-to-right (priority gaps land where the eye does), drill-down across combined parts, intros hidden when the Full has data to suppress double-counting, and a simplified row-level anonymity rule that stopped over-restricting cells once a row qualifies. If you've been looking at your report, refresh.
Maturity vs Importance dual-polygon radar. New visualization between the heatmap and the priority-gaps table. Solid blue is maturity, dashed amber is importance, and the gap between them is where you said it matters against where you actually are. The dual-overlay is what makes this platform different from the dozens of assessment tools that only chart maturity. Defaults to the lowest-scoring template so your eye lands on the priority area first.
Self-serve account deletion + a clearer privacy notice. GDPR right-to-erasure is now a first-class flow on /account (typed-confirmation modal; aggregated company views recompute to exclude the deleted user). The /privacy page was expanded to spell out the k-anonymity threshold, the Controller / Processor model for B2B engagements, and the self-serve erasure path. Most of the privacy items from April's anonymity policy work are now closed.

Highlights — mfgusecases.com

Diagnose. New entry point above Featured Use Cases on the home page and in the main nav. Three modes: pick a KPI that's trending the wrong way, pick a department, or describe what you're seeing in plain language. All three converge on the same backbone (Symptom → Cause → Use Cases → Shortlist). A Focus 1–5 selector mirrors the contextual graph's threshold mechanic for tightening or broadening the candidate cause set. The shortlist persists across the flow so you can collect use cases from multiple symptoms in one session.
Cause ranking, in two passes. First attempt ranked causes by raw frequency. Result: every department and KPI surfaced the same handful of corpus-common items at the top ("Missing Equipment Sensors," "Incompatible System Formats"). True, but not useful. Second pass switched to lift (concentration in scope vs. corpus baseline); Materials suddenly surfaced Supply Chain Material Flow Variability and Lead Time Variability in Planning, FPY surfaced Missing Lot to Production Linkage and Sensor Calibration Drift. Third pass added Bayesian shrinkage with a small prior to stop small-N causes from beating substantive larger-N ones; Lead Time Variability moved into the top five for On-Time Delivery where the smoothing pulled the noisy 2-of-4 spikes back to neutral. The lesson, again: statistical pipelines need an opinion-shaped layer on top of the math.
Lists sharing, rebuilt. The old model attached a list to a single team via group_id. The new model separates ownership from sharing in a list_shares table — share with multiple teams or the company hierarchy (cascading from corporate to division to plant), with view and edit roles. A new owner-only Share dialog manages who has access; chips on the list detail show it for everyone. The My Lists tab on /account now splits into three sections: lists you own, shared with my company, shared with my teams. A new Company row in Account Details surfaces your org affiliation alongside name and email. All existing team-shared lists migrated cleanly with no user-visible disruption.

Cross-site this week

Sitewide Feedback button on both sites. Floating bottom-right launcher on every page (including the public Sample Report). Click it for a category selector (Bug / Suggestion / Praise / Other), free-text body, and an email field for anonymous visitors. Submissions land in our inbox immediately and in a triage queue at /admin/feedback on each site. The admin page defaults to its site's feedback but pivots to the cross-site view when you want it. Any visitor can tell us anything, and we read every submission.
Combined-series assessments → one shared use case list. When a user completes both parts of a multi-part assessment on mfg-surveys.com (Operational Excellence, Plant Maintenance, Plant Materials, Plant IT/OT), the platform auto-generates a single use case list on mfgusecases.com named "{Series} — Priority Gaps (Combined)" covering every gap from both parts. That list now drops into the new mfgusecases sharing model, so it's shareable with your team or your company by default. The assessment surfaces priority areas; the use case list operationalizes them; the new sharing layer lets you bring colleagues in. End-to-end across both sites in one click.

Coming soon

The four big strategic items we've been scoping:

Solution mapping — every use case mapped to the categories of commercial solution (MES, QMS, CMMS, EAM, APS, machine monitoring) that address it. Closes the "OK, what do I buy to act on this?" loop.
Auto-generated User Requirements Documents — take a shortlist plus company context, generate a vendor-ready URD with stakeholders, functional requirements, KPI acceptance criteria, and constraints. URDs are notoriously painful to write by hand and this is one of the highest-leverage outputs the platform's content can support.
Personalized training recommendations — when an assessment flags a gap, recommend specific content as a learning path framed for the relevant role. Content sourcing is the bottleneck; we're scoping partnerships.
Company production system builder — selected use cases organized into a coherent operating model (think Toyota Production System), branded and sequenced for a specific company. Likely ships on valuemaps.com when that lands.

And on the surveys side near-term: a company rubric that lets admins opt in to the subset of platform surveys that fit their org (smaller plants don't have all 18 functions; industries weight differently). First step toward custom surveys.

Questions, feedback, or want to chat about whether either platform fits your operation? Reply to this email, or hit the new Feedback button on any page. We read everything.

— Tim Stuart, Visual Decisions