Manufacturers have always prioritized quality, efficiency, and productivity, relying on human capital to produce products that meet customer demand. Some innovative plants have invested in Industry 4.0 technology, including connecting CNC machine tools, industrial automation, 3D printing, and manufacturing analytics, but it has been far from ubiquitous. In the new normal, this must change. Managing through the […]
OEM Manufacturers, resellers, and distributors see the opportunity to drive revenue growth and enhance customer experience with products and services enabled by IoT Connected products, data, analytics platforms, and APIs. Savvy industrial businesses are gaining competitive advantage by integrating smart technologies in their products and providing digital and Industry 4.0 solutions out-of-the-box. The Go-To-Market Value […]
Smart factories are an opportunity to create new forms of efficiency and flexibility by connecting devices, systems, processes, and stakeholders to optimize current and future supply and demand requirements. This is accomplished by transforming and improving ways in which people, processes and technologies operate to deliver the critical information needed to impact decision quality, efficiency, cost […]
OEE, or Overall Equipment Effectiveness, is a commonly used metric to measure shop floor performance. OEE is a composite metric that combines the availability, quality, and performance, and can be calculated for a device, line, or even for a part. The OEE metric can support decisions to assess normalized performance across a range of assets, […]
The “Digital Thread” identifies the flow of information across the lifecycle of design and manufacturing, going beyond information simply flowing from design to manufacturing, to true bi-directional communication across design and manufacturing. Implementing the Digital Thread in a manufacturing enterprise can radically increase the velocity of NPI by improving how engineering changes are communicated along the […]
The goal of any maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) organization is to get products back in the hands of the customer as quickly and cheaply as possible. However, it’s never easy. Nobody can accurately predict when equipment will fail, (failure prediction is the subject of a lot of industrial AI research; a much longer discussion […]
A supply chain is a complicated system to manage from both the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) perspective and the tiered supplier perspective. OEMs require on-time delivery of quality parts for assembly. Suppliers are looking for a predictable schedule and demand, as well as needing on-time delivery of quality parts from their suppliers. Variability in demand […]
The digital transformation is here. Manufacturing leaders are driving value through data-driven business decisions and enabling the digital ecosystem by optimizing and automating processes from design to delivery. During this panel discussion the participants shared tips and tricks on leveraging data and digital technology to enable better decisions and competitive advantage. This write-up summarizes some […]
Most people are unaware; Additive Manufacturing has been around for a long time, over thirty years to be exact. Historically it has been relegated to prototyping and product development, only in the last ten years have we seen a surge in the applicability of additive manufacturing, and now, hybrid, a combination of additive and subtractive […]
Operating manufacturing plants at full capacity requires coordinated decision-making across the different functions in the plant, chief among which are maintenance and production. This requires a single-source-of-truth for decision-making – centralized data collection and analytics to support production as well as maintenance decisions. This includes analyzing machine data to support production decisions such as improving […]