What's New This Week (April 26, 2026)

Platform Guide, CESMII SM Areas, and Knowledge Graph Polish

This Week's Big Addition: A Platform Guide

We've launched a dedicated Guide section on mfgusecases.com to help you get more out of the platform.

A common piece of feedback we've heard is that the structure of the site — the multi-dimensional taxonomy, the knowledge graph, the layered ontology of value leaks → root causes → enablers → KPIs — is both the platform's biggest source of value AND its steepest learning curve. So we wrote it down.

Three foundation pages are live now at mfgusecases.com/guide:

How This Site Is Organized — Why a single use case can show up under "Quality" the department, "Quality" the function, "Quality" the competitive advantage, and "Quality" the stakeholder. Same word, four legitimate meanings — and how to use that to your advantage.
Reading the Knowledge Graph — What each color means, why the shape is what it is, how to read influence scores, and how to use the graph for the kind of cross-cutting analysis you can't get from any AI chat. Includes a worked example walking through accountability across multiple departments.
Anatomy of a Use Case — The five-tab structure every use case page follows, what each section answers, and a five-minute speed-read path for time-poor readers.

You'll find the Guide link in the main nav. First-time visitors will also see a small banner pointing to it on the browse page.

New: CESMII Smart Manufacturing Area Tags

We've added a new tag dimension based on CESMII's six Smart Manufacturing framework areas:

Manufacturing Strategy & Leadership
Manufacturing Excellence & Culture
Data-Driven Processes
System Infrastructure & Integration
Workforce Optimization
Supply Chain Resilience & Agility

Every use case has been classified by AI against these areas with confidence scores. The CESMII SM Area filter is now available in the browse sidebar — useful if your transformation roadmap is organized around the SM framework, or if you want to see which use cases primarily address a specific pillar.

Knowledge Graph Improvements

Several enhancements went live this week to make the graph easier to read and navigate:

Bigger, more visible "View Knowledge Graph" button on every use case page hero. The graph is the platform's most distinctive feature — it shouldn't be hidden behind a small pill link.
Collapsible legend in the top-right of every graph showing what each node color and shape represents.
Click hints in hover tooltips — when you hover a node that's clickable (most are), the tooltip now tells you so. Each click takes you to that node's contextual graph.
Threshold slider added to the per-use-case knowledge graph (it was already on the cause/enabler/KPI graphs). Use the 1-5 buttons in the top-left to filter from "show everything" down to "show only the strongest connections."
Better color separation between root cause (amber) and enabler (red) nodes — easier to distinguish at a glance.

Browse Improvements

Filter tooltips — small "?" icons next to each filter section explain what that dimension means and how it differs from adjacent ones. Hover to see the explanation.
A-Z sort by process area — when you sort alphabetically, the order now matches the labels you see on the cards (process area), not the longer underlying titles.

Behind the scenes

Better admin tooling — new diagnostic at /admin/quality/gaps showing which use cases are missing prose fields or child-table coverage. Drives our backfill prioritization.
Richer blog support — the blog rendering pipeline now supports tables, embedded video (YouTube/Vimeo), task lists, and inline images. You'll see more visual content here as we publish more case-narrative posts.

Also New

A new blog post is in the works that walks through accountability problems in manufacturing — and uses the platform to show how 16 use cases across 11 departments reveal the same underlying patterns. It's a practical demonstration of the kind of cross-cutting analysis the platform makes possible. Watch for it shortly.

As always, the full use case library is free to browse. Pro access unlocks root cause analysis, enabler details, and the deeper layers of each use case.

Questions or feedback? Reply to this email — we read everything.

— Tim Stuart, Visual Decisions