Information technology has always been a shunned step-child in manufacturing’s day-to-day operations. As the buzz of the Internet of Things starts ringing in decision-makers’ ears (carrying promises of increased business intelligence enabling decisions to be made with greater confidence), IT will finally become integral and welcome through the product life cycle. Education, dedication, and persistence will be required from all aspects of the business to form new multi-talented teams–or task forces–that will have the ability and influence to overcome some of the biggest challenges in American manufacturing culture.Chris Misztur

Layered Approach

• CORPORATE LEVEL

  Rules for change are set at the global level.
  • eliminate noise
  • systemic symptoms are not problems
  • capture data closest to the process
  • remove human intervention from data collection
  • capture only data you need, no more, no less
  • find answers in the order of ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘why’
  • change must be measurable

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• FACTORY LEVEL

  Build a flexible ecosystem.
  • plug-and-play factory templates
  • concern for security and latency
  • strong vendor relationships
  • support existing data collection initiatives

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• PROCESS LEVEL

  Each process deserves individual attention.

  While internal features of a PLC provide data about a specific device I/O point, they provide little value, by themselves, to the business. To transform the internal feature data into information it must be combined and computed with other internal features of the the same or other PLC. Even then, what you get is information isolated to the manufacturing context, disjointed from the operational or business contexts. Therefore, the meaningfulness and value of the information can only be conveyed to and understood by limited groups within an organization. More valuable information is realized by combining manufacturing and operational data through the use of both internal features and external features.

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• Kepware is a registered trademark of Kepware Technologies.