Understanding overall equipment effectiveness begins with having a clear, comprehensive view into machine performance — information that can be garnered from proper data collection and management. Your organization’s ability to accurately measure equipment uptime, efficiency and effectiveness in real time is critical to improving operational performance.

Only through knowing exactly what needs to be calculated — and for what purpose — can your organization make steps toward finding a scalable solution that not only solves today’s issues but uncovers new opportunities to extend productivity and performance.

Achieving smart manufacturing begins with establishing organizational goals and then determining where your organization is in the process of implementing business intelligence tools and applications. Depending on the answers, your organization likely can create opportunity to meet a variety of goals by starting down the path to smart manufacturing:

• Improve visibility into the production floor processes.
• Leverage real-time production data and tie it to the enterprise resource planning system to optimize material scheduling and maintenance activities.
• Increase productivity and return on investment through analysis of asset and resource utilization.
• Increase collaboration among engineering, operations, IT and management to reduce downtime.
• Reduce cost, effort and development time by selecting proven, interoperable hardware and software technologies.
• Realize the value of Internet of Things devices.

In the past, manufacturers identified and handled these issues by simply implementing one-off solutions. Results of this practice, while solving problems in certain aspects of the business, begin to compound, leaving the organization with various disparate pieces of technology and data, hindering the ability to connect those devices and solutions to make more effective use of the collected data.

Today, a holistic view provides the ability to implement solutions tailored for your organization’s needs. Successful smart manufacturing begins with an understanding of your digital maturity level and a vision for what your organization plans to achieve.

By understanding your organization’s current state, where it is headed and where you ultimately want to go, you can begin to look beyond the immediate concerns and develop a forward-thinking strategy to solve today’s tough problems and prepare for future challenges.

In this way, the strategy effectively makes use of the intrinsic benefits of existing implementations, making it possible to leverage those solutions in other areas of the organization. For instance, a complex technology like artificial intelligence or machine learning may not be required. Instead, if you know the issues the organization is facing and the data needed to solve those issues, you can work backward to find solutions that fit the existing infrastructure of the business and are applicable across the organization.

Sometimes, the easiest approach is the most effective solution. Through workshops, interviews and ideation sessions, your organization can define the vision and guiding principles with which to direct the organization’s activities to achieve its goals.

From technology solutions to equipment modifications, to people and process change management, developing a smart manufacturing strategy consists of various elements that depend greatly on organizational goals and digital maturity. Our team works to help you understand those factors and then focuses on defining scalable solutions that meet immediate needs and future touchpoints.

The strategy developed may leverage existing data, collection and generation of new data, and implementation of a data governance framework to give the data proper context. This enables meaningful, accelerated real-time business decisions, from members on the shop floor to executives in the boardroom. This approach helps lay the foundation for accelerated growth, utilizing a strategy that embraces purposeful change through technology and innovation.