Digital Transformation is a hot topic for manufacturing today and we often receive questions on where to start. There is no one-size fits all approach as each company’s most pressing issues vary as well as their readiness to “digitize” their operations. However, we have found Downtime Tracking and OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) projects are often
I’ve often likened my job to the popular TV show, “How It’s Made”. Each month, I’m involved with dozens of client conversations. While the breadth of industrial applications and industries is wide, the issues these companies face are remarkably similar. One of the most prevalent is a desire to get accurate and timely information into
The economy is steam-rolling, and your manufacturing business is in full tilt. So, the question is, with your current plant floor operating philosophy and capability, are your customer’s more satisfied than before the uptick? Your customer’s satisfaction is based to a large extent on your operational team’s capability to hit targets related to the Big
If it walks like a duck and honks like a duck, it’s probably a goose… I was born and raised in northern Cincinnati and like many Midwest cities, we suffer from an extreme increase in the Canadian Goose population. These geese love to flit about in man-made water retention ponds, a result of new commercial
Sound counter-intuitive? I agree. Typically, when organizations are really busy, product and application training falls to a lower priority because our belief is that we just don’t have time; everyone is booked. I think this connects with all of us at some level. After all, if our teams are booked on projects and pressed to
“Where you stand depends on where you sit”, commonly known as Miles’ Law was coined by Rufus E. Miles, Jr. He was an assistant secretary under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. It was originally used when describing bureaucratic politics. From a more current perspective it just might offer some insights into organizational change, engagement, and
Here in the sunny state of Florida, hurricane season is never far from our minds. It signals an extended period of tropical storms, fully-fledged hurricanes and just generally more unstable weather patterns. For our larger water & waste water municipalities, having an alarm management system to triage their critical alarms vs nuisance alarms is absolutely
A client organization recently completed an OEE deployment. I asked the plant manager and production manager to share some of their thoughts on how it went and some of their learnings. The plant manager stated “We really didn’t understand OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) or the impacts of the program until we were down the road
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things). IIoT has been picking up a lot of headlines over the past few years in the industrial automation space and there is good reason. McKinsey estimates that IoT (Internet of Things) will have an economic impact of up to $6.2
Do you know the number one application in manufacturing for maintenance and safety inspection rounds? Do your thoughts go immediately to a technology provider? It’s a common first thought but it’s incorrect. The number one solution used manufacturing today is…good old fashioned pen & paper, often used in conjunction with the second most used solution, Excel® spreadsheets! Surprised? You
In my role as Manufacturing Solutions Architect I have seen many industries and manufacturing processes up close. These range from consumer goods to mining to petrochemicals and beyond. These businesses couldn’t be more different except for the general acceptance of deploying OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) to drive improvements. If your organization uses OEE as a
The allure of the Industrial Internet of Things is the promise of making systems work better based on connected data through the internet. Data can come from a sensor, a web server, a web service, another device, such as a mobile phone. Really any electronic device which can receive/send data through the internet is a