5 Reasons why you should invest in a shop floor visibility system

Optimizing shop-floor productivity is a primary concern for most manufacturers today, and they are directing resources to accomplish this task. A decision analyst survey of 150 North American manufacturers, sponsored by IQMS revealed that 76% of the participating manufacturers considered improving shop-floor productivity their most valuable growth strategy.

Real-time monitoring is a crucial driver of shop floor productivity. Among all manufacturers in the survey, 81 percent say that real-time monitoring is making contributions to their business, and 72 percent define real-time monitoring as essential for streamlining and making inventory reconciliation accurate.

In particular, 87 percent of plastics and process-based manufacturers say real-time monitoring is essential to their operations. The highest adoption is among companies investing in new or upgraded smart machinery; 100 percent of these manufacturers currently have real-time monitoring in place or are in the final stages of implementing it across their production centers.

If you’re serious about achieving high-performance, real-time monitoring is a must-have feature in your smart manufacturing arsenal. Let us explore how real-time monitoring can drive growth for your business.

Enhance productivity

In the age of digital transformation services, real-time monitoring can help your businesses to deal with age-old problems such as dealing with downtime, increasing efficiency and logistics management. Its ability to provide actionable intelligence concerning manufacturing operations like overall equipment efficiency, energy consumption rates, operator productivity etc. helps scale productivity.

The more accurate and higher quality the data captured, the faster you can achieve lights-out shifts across your plants.

Achieve high quality through SPC

Knowing which production processes, machines, work centers and product lines are operating at high-quality levels and which aren’t is essential for keeping shop floor operations running smoothly. Having real-time data to use in SPC for continually tracking, controlling and fine-tuning manufacturing processes is key.

Operators can also get a real-time view of process performance using quick inspection, control and trend charts. Setting up alerts to quality management, production engineering, and scheduling when there is a deviation in performance can help avert millions of dollars in lost production time.

Improve traceability and tracking

Real time monitoring enables you to track key performance indicators (KPIs), ensure compliance with regulatory standards, and meet customer requirements. For example, a leading medical device manufacturer leveraged real-time monitoring to track and trace instances where FDA regulations apply. As a result, the manufacturer could integrate specific compliance requirements into the manufacturing process itself, and eliminate the costs associated with manual tracking procedures.

Prolong life of production assets

Leading manufacturers are relying on real-time monitoring to prolong the life of production assets, with the fastest growing companies using analytics, BI and machine learning to predict preventative maintenance schedules more effectively. The more complex the production process, the greater the reliance is on real-time monitoring to reduce the incidence of production downtime due to equipment failures.

By combining real-time condition-based data with predictive analytics, it is possible to determine when a given machine will need repair. This will allow you to achieve a better return on your equipment investments.

Give your manufacturing business the gift of visibility

A real-time shop floor monitoring solution helps you to keep a check on the equipment health and operations on the shop floor to monitor it 24*7 and detect anomalies without involving human effort.

It takes only a few simple steps to move to a smart manufacturing system:

• Automate the process that is draining your resources and efforts currently
• Move from old paper methods to a digital system
• Collect and organize data in real-time instead of doing it after the process is complete

Talk to experts to figure out a custom shop floor monitoring solution for your business. A solution can revamp your manufacturing process to enhance production processes, improve product quality and scale revenues.

Author Info

Gengarajan PV is a CEO of Hakuna Matata Solutions, a leading Digital transformation and Web application development company. He has more than 14 years of experience in the Information Technology industry. He spends his time reading about new technologies in Manufacturing, Distribution & Logistics industries.