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, but those with machine monitoring...
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 not sufficient for maximizing output and...
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 information. The dashboard concept...
IIoT, or the Industrial Internet of Things is a very common phrase in this Industry 4.0 world. First, let’s look at the definition of the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is simply devices connected to the Internet that have the ability to send or exchange data. The reason for the popularity of IoT is that utilizing this data can...
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a great metric and can provide a lot of value, but OEE has shortcomings and limitations that can be addressed by a modern monitoring system. OEE shouldn’t be avoided but diving directly into OEE is not always the best solution to maximize value from a shop floor machine monitoring system. Let’s use a performance issue as...
Enterprise Resource Planning solutions or ERP is a system to manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting, purchasing, planning, scheduling, and much more. ERP is not new to business or manufacturing. What is innovative is that we integrate the data from ERP systems with machine monitoring extending ERP data to the shop floor, as well as providing accurate machine and shop...
