Knowing when a machine goes down is certainly important. Knowing there’s a pattern to its downtime is even more important.
On the shop floor, the cost of a machine breaking, changing over or even just sitting idle is expensive. Just knowing immediately when the event occurs is extremely valuable. The longer the machine sits, the greater the impact on the facility’s total productivity. Many astute plant managers and manufacturing engineers know this. Knowing machine status in real-time can be one of the biggest drivers for shop floor management systems like MV2 to be integrated into their facilities.
What may not be fully considered is the value in knowing that machine’s performance over time.
Having manufacturing machine metrics over a long period of time creates the ability to see patterns. When a production manager can see those patterns, they can get new insight what’s going on, make necessary changes and possibly head off bigger issues in the future.
With this historical data at their fingertips managers can answer in-depth questions, for instance: Are the downtime events happening on jobs with certain materials? Perhaps different tooling is needed, or another machine might be better on that material. Does it happen on certain shifts or with certain operators? Maybe more training is necessary. Is the downtime really just idle time from processes upstream?
How do production managers and manufacturing engineers get to this level of manufacturing data analytics? Recording this information is what a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) like MV2 does. When a machine or a work cell is connected to an MES, downtime conditions are automatically reported to the system’s server. The states are available for managers and engineers to pour over for indications of long-term issues like the ones listed above or many others.
Of course, an MES provides a number of other benefits to help streamline shop floor operations. If you’re looking to get ahead of downtime issues rather than just reacting to events, contact us today. Our highly experienced integration experts can walk through what’s possible with your operations.
