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...

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 quality data, and how...