Manufacturers operate in a dynamic environment. Order quantities rise and fall, customers’ taste change and older product lines decline as new ones come on stream. What almost no one expected though were the extraordinary economic circumstances and challenging shop floor operations that we have been living through these last few weeks. For many manufacturers this… Read more »
You’ve canceled meetings, you have people working from home, and sickness and absence rates are higher than usual due to Covid-19: tough times indeed, especially for anyone running a manufacturing business. Customers are understanding but finished parts and products must still ship, especially if needed for essential medical equipment. These challenges will stretch any manufacturer,… Read more »
Manufacturing has always been the backbone of industry in America, often stepping up when our country needs it most. During World War II many factories converted their lines to produce military equipment, transportation and ammunition. As we are engulfed in a global pandemic, Manufacturers are, yet again, re-tooling and re-positioning to provide essential items. With… Read more »
CNC machines cut away metal and make money, but they can’t do that if they’re not running. How do you know if they’re running? Managing By Walking About is one approach, machine monitoring is a better one. Machine monitoring shows how production equipment is being utilized at any moment in time. That knowledge can help… Read more »
Using visual and auditory cues an experienced Manufacturing Manager can often sense when a factory is running well. Silence means no production. No workers present, no production. It’s an informal, and highly subjective, form of machine monitoring with “data” obtained through “Managing By Walking About” (MBWA.) The practice has much to recommend it, but it’s… Read more »
Imagine driving a car where the dashboard reports yesterday’s speed and distance covered. It sounds bizarre yet that’s how many Operations and Production Managers run their factories. They know output and OEE numbers for the previous day, but that’s of little help in maximizing performance today. What they need are manufacturing dashboards displaying real-time, actionable… Read more »
To start with, everyone here at Scytec would like to wish all of our customers a happy New Year. As we step into the new decade we wanted to share a little information about some upcoming plans for 2020 and our roadmap for the Scytec DataXchange machine monitoring service, as well as the upcoming trends… Read more »
As the year comes to a close, we want to take a minute to thank all our customers for a great 2019 and reflect back on some of the events that took place within DataXchange and for Scytec in general. DataXchange had multiple updates throughout the year as well as the addition of the dedicated… Read more »
Good data is the key to improving manufacturing performance and cutting costs. With good data you can maximize bottleneck utilization, measure OEE accurately, use resources more efficiently and find and reduce waste. The challenge is, how do you capture that good data? Here we’ll explore the importance of manufacturing data collection, the difference between good and bad… Read more »
Successful manufacturers become and remain successful by finding and driving out waste. As practitioners of Lean Manufacturing know, waste takes many forms, but it’s hard to always know where to look for it. Possibly the best tool to use is machine monitoring and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). By providing information about what’s happening on the… Read more »
