Modern manufacturing equipment is studded with sensors. Every part of the supply chain coughs out data, every step in production has data input (much of it automatically gathered), every repair or return of a defective item comes with a gold mine of information. Manufacturers certainly don't need to go looking for data. In its 2011 Big Data report, the McKinsey Global Institute noted that manufacturing "stores more data than any other sector - close to 2 exabytes of new data stored in 2010." Importantly, they noted that manufacturers need productivity growth and "will need to leverage large data sets to drive efficiency across the extended enterprise and to design and market higher-quality products."
So the data is there, but it is rarely absorbed, collected or properly analyzed.
