If you haven’t yet tuned into Manufacturing Meet Up, Augury’s new podcast with industry veterans Alvaro Cuba and Ed Ballina, now’s the time… In a recent episode, they dived deep into plant tours – describing what they’re looking for and what they don’t want to see. For this post, Ed summarizes the tips he and Alvaro offered. Be warned: there’s some restroom humor. 

My friend Alvaro Cuba and I host a podcast called Manufacturing Meet Up. In a recent episode, ‘The Rise Of “New-Collar” Jobs And Top Plant Tour Tips,’ we shared our advice about the often dreaded factory tours undertaken by C-Suite executives in search of real-world insights to help in their battle with the bottom line. The podcast also became an opportunity to vent about my aversion to the smell of wet paint – more on this later. 

These tours are also an opportunity for the same executives to celebrate wins, teach and get the temperature of the frontline as well as making themselves accessible. 

And like many, Alvaro and I started our manufacturing careers, on the factory floor, so we have lots of experience from both sides of the aisle. I remember how nerve-racking these tours can be as a plant manager. No matter how well-prepared we were, I’d still lose sleep the night before and show up feeling fuzzy – at a time when I needed to be at my best and quick on my feet to answer the myriad of questions.

Now, when I do these tours as a guest, I try to be respectful since I’ve walked in their shoes. For instance, I would not take a deep dive into their sewers (though I must admit I did do that once, but I will save that story for a future podcast). 

Meanwhile, here you have a round-up of our tips: 

1) The tour begins at the parking lot

I’ll spill the key takeaway at the beginning: be ready. That said, you should be ready every day, day-in-day-out. 

“It’s like those modern restaurants with the open kitchen: if you see it’s dirty, and the chef is running around like their hair is on fire, you probably won’t want to eat there.”

You also have to realize the tour starts in your parking lot. If your parking lot is messy with trash everywhere and esoteric items hanging off your trees, you will need to put a lot of future effort into overcoming that first impression. So just get it done. This is just too easy to deal with. The first things people see are incredibly important. Are your parking stripes fresh or faded and worn out?

Alvaro had a great story from early in his career when a regional president came by. Naturally, they had the tour all planned, but this guy insisted they first go through the restrooms, the locker rooms, the cafeteria… It’s like those modern restaurants with the open kitchen: if you see it’s dirty, and the chef is running around like their hair is on fire, you probably won’t want to eat there.  

2) We know the factory is at its best

When an executive walks into your facility, they know what they see is probably the best this place has looked in months – if not years, depending on when the last tour was. 

Most places will tell you that they are always tour-ready – and sometimes this is grossly overstated. I’d say this is true for about 20% of the plants. Why do I know this? Because I can smell wet paint on four out of five visits. (And if I smell that paint and things still look tired and need upkeep, I get concerned.)

But as Alvaro pointed out, no plant is perfect, and as long as it’s obvious you are on the journey, you recognize where you are on that journey, and you are open about it, it’s fine. The real reason we are visiting is to help. Maybe we will even send some funding your way. Think of us as investors. I have limited capital and expense dollars to spread across the facilities. I want to invest where I have confidence I will see a return. I also want to reward equipment stewardship.

“Conversely if they’re struggling and failing, you can also see that in their faces. It’s written all over them – like a billboard. Like Hotel California: ‘You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!'”

3) The tour is about people, not machines

Alvaro said his focus is always on the people. As he put it, “I believe that people are what matters. People are the ones who make things happen. And if you go into a plant and you see people smiling, being agile and moving around with their equipment with a clear goal, this tells you everything you need to know without seeing any KPIs. The culture is working.”

I back this 100%. If you walk into a place, you can just tell if a place is winning. There’s an energy, a certain aura… Okay, maybe I’m getting a little soft here, but you can really feel it. And conversely if they’re struggling and failing, you can also see that in their faces. It’s written all over them – like a billboard. Like Hotel California: “You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!”

4) Assume we know what we’re doing

You can safely bet we’ve looked at the numbers and that we will be curious about those areas where they don’t quite add up. Don’t try to pull the wool over our eyes. Keep in mind that the people taking the tour likely had the same job as you. They know all the tricks. In fact, they likely tried all the tricks back in their day – and also failed badly at it. I certainly did. 

“We all laughed. It was a great way to close the visit. And this brings up another key point: always leave a facility with hope

5) Bathrooms are dangerous

As a visitor, sometimes you can get your intel from the strangest places. I remember being in a washroom stall during a break near the end of one tour. A couple of the managers walked in talking about how pleased they were that I had not noticed their waste problem. I had actually flagged this in my pre-work and planned to bring it up during my summary review at the end. So, when we went back to the meeting room, I made them suffer just a little bit. I returned back to the waste problem they thought I had forgotten about. Then I gave them a few ideas on how to deal with this waste issue. Finally I gave them some career advice: “Always check the stalls!” The two managers knew instantly what I was talking about. 

We all laughed. It was a great way to close the visit. And this brings up another key point: always leave a facility with hope.

6) No really, take down those wet-paint signs

Okay, I am doubling back to the wet paint thing… I know you will clean, organize, and be on your best behavior. But just don’t paint anything the day before I show up. I can smell it. Everything’s bright and shiny. And whatever you do, take down the wet paint signs. They’re a dead giveaway. And if I do happen to get any of that yellow bollard paint on my shirt, you’re paying for the replacement. I’m serious.

Look, if it’s really not the right time for a visit, just say so. We can arrange a later date. And I get to wear my favorite shirt for another day. 

“It’s really about educating each other, establishing trust, building a relationship, and figuring out how to get things done. It’s a chance to get the help you need so your plant can reach its true potential.”

7) Be open – because we want you to win

Don’t try to step away from the tough story. It’s okay, we all have tough stories, and a good leader will recognize it as the first step to fixing the problem. In fact, a leader’s job is to help you fix that problem. 

It’s not about impressing, bragging, or – heaven forbid – painting. Don’t get me wrong, your facility and equipment should be in like new condition and this includes periodic painting.  If I smell fresh paint it tells me you painted for the tour, and you didn’t it plan it well enough to have the paint properly dry – not good on both fronts.

But the visit is really about educating each other, establishing trust, building a relationship, and figuring out how to get things done. It’s a chance to get the help you need so your plant can reach its true potential. As Alvaro put it, “Every plant visit is an opportunity”. I couldn’t have said it better.

Oh, and by the way, there’s one smell I do like: fresh coffee.

Tune into the Manufacturing Meet Up podcast: ‘The Rise Of “New-Collar” Jobs And Top Plant Tour Tips’.

The post Top Tips For Plant Tours: “Every Factory Has Its Strengths And Its Opportunities. Own It.” appeared first on Augury.

In a Packaging Digest article, Augury advisor Ed Ballina uses his experience as former VP of manufacturing and warehousing at PepsiCo to explain the benefits of Machine Health monitoring to improve equipment reliability and uptime when labelling plastic bottles.

Packaging Digest just published ‘How Machine Health Monitoring Can Improve Labeling Operations’ by industry legend Ed Ballina, who also serves as Augury’s Food & Beverage Board Advisor. The article describes the power of AI- and IoT-driven predictive maintenance – or ‘Machine Health’ – tools in improving process and eliminating waste and mechanical failure.

Machine Health monitoring can alert maintenance teams to issues and how to fix them – while avoiding downtime. While applicable to the full manufacturing spectrum, in this article Ed focuses on the specific benefits for labeling operations. After a quick lesson in how plastic bottles are labeled, he describes some real-use cases on how Machine Health monitoring can provide speedy ROI.

Read more about Machine Health Use Cases.

Use Case #1: Ensure Clean Cuts

When you are labeling 600-800 bottles a minute, visual inspection is simply not enough when it comes to making sure the cutter is sharp and the equipment aligned. The wasteful result: a surplus of ugly packaging that will be judged by the consumer, and/or unlabeled product that’s discarded as ‘mysterious’ once they reach the retail outlet.

“Predictive analytics can lead us to this real-time process monitoring of labeling performance,” observes Ed. “It can determine when the cutter blades dull to the point where they start cutting raggedly. At that point, we can exchange the blades for new ones — during regular downtime instead of an unplanned stop — making poor labeling due to bad cuts a thing of the past.”

Use Case #2: Beware of Label Variations

Another familiar problem for labeling operations: a seemingly identical new roll of material causes a litany of new problems.

“Analyzing Machine Health data from the ‘good’ running roll and comparing it to data from the ‘bad’ running roll is likely to provide clues,” says Ed. “Many times, insights gleaned from analyzing the data captured by the new technology tools confirm what frontline workers know anecdotally and have learned from experience.” 

In short, the article is worth the read for anyone with a labeling line who is out to pump up their productivity.

Learn more about the value of using predictive analytical tools for labeling. 

The post How Machine Health Monitoring Can Improve Labeling Operations appeared first on Augury.

It’s safe to assume that every company wants the maintenance performed on its production and manufacturing equipment to be precise. After all, who would want imprecise maintenance? But assuming that maintenance is being performed to the highest standards possible and actually taking the steps to assure that it is are two different things. The difference in equipment performance can be night and day.

Let me give you the flat tire example. Imagine if all the tools you had to change a tire were a hammer, a pair of pliers and a rusty jack. Could you change the tire? Maybe… you could try to loosen the lug nuts by using the pliers and the hammer. The rusty jack might lift the vehicle enough to change the tire. You can use the hammer and pliers to tighten the lugnuts and hope for the best as you head down the road.

The “precision” approach would have the person use a proper lug nut wrench which would easily loosen the nuts. The correct jack would raise the vehicle safely until the flat tire could be replaced by the spare. The spare would be inflated to its correct pressure with clean, dry air and checked by a tire pressure gage. The lug nut wrench would be used to tighten the lugnuts in a star pattern to make sure proper seating and that the rim isn’t bent. Finally, a torque wrench would be utilized to make sure all the nuts are at the correct torque setting. Which tire do you think would run the longest without an issue?

Incorporating what’s come to be known as “precision maintenance” into a company’s standard operating procedures requires establishing and enforcing four basic criteria:

1. Training

First, technicians performing maintenance must be highly trained. Just explaining how a function is to be performed or merely showing someone what to do and then handing them the tools is not enough. Formal training in maintenance techniques and the particularities of each piece of equipment a technician will be working on are a must. For example, have you been taught that you should loosen lug nuts while the tire is still on the ground so the tire doesn’t rotate?

2. Best Practices

Second, best practices must be defined and followed. For example, there are many ways of tightening lug nuts when replacing a spare tire, but the established best practice is to tighten them in a star pattern. Similarly, each maintenance step to be performed should be outlined in a step-by-step way according to accepted best-practice procedures — or those that are developed and instituted for each job. These practices should also include specific settings or specifications. Under or over inflated tires can cause premature wear, poor performance and catastrophic failure.

3. Best Materials

Third, the best-available materials should be used for all work. This is where many attempts at precision maintenance run aground, either through attempts to cut costs or through complacency by failure to seek out and use the best possible materials and tools. For example, do you choose premium, contaminant-free lubricants or ones that merely meet requirements? Do you use laser-guided tools when high-precision work must be done or do you rely on a ruler? Do you mandate the use of calibrated torque wrenches or do you allow staff to use whatever tools they like? Most importantly, do you have procedures in place to ensure that the correct tools are being used for each job? Is the air you are using to inflate the tire clean or is it contaminated with water or other impurities that can cause premature failure? Did you use the correct size wrench or did you round out the nuts because you used a wrench that was “good enough”?

4. Maintaining Records And Having Data

Make the fix; move on to the next problem. That’s the general approach to maintenance on many plant floors. But without documentation of the fixes or changes, the reasons for them, and exactly how the changes were made, it’s difficult to improve a process and perform maintenance more precisely.

Many new technologies automatically collect data. Augury, for example, continuously gathers mechanical data from machines, uses it to automatically diagnose machine health and reports signs of incipient trouble. Incorporating that data into plant floor operations permits preemptive actions that make maintenance more precise, cuts downtime and often avoids more expensive and extensive repairs.

While precision maintenance has been discussed and its practices refined over the past decade, acceptance has been gradual for a variety of reasons. One factor is cost. Using better tools and higher-quality supplies involves greater upfront costs, even if there are savings in the long run. Another factor is time. Sometimes it takes just a bit longer to get the fix right, this may mean more downtime to execute the correct fix.

Another stumbling block is human nature. Maintenance people, like almost everyone else, are resistant to change. They like performing maintenance tasks in the ways they’ve always performed those tasks — especially if maintenance stays under the radar of those higher up the corporate ladder and doesn’t seem to cause any issues.

But with all the evidence confirming that high-quality manufacturing leads to more satisfied customers and greater profitability, it’s time that maintenance efforts adopt the same outlook. Like high-quality manufacturing, precision maintenance is essentially about reducing variability. And reducing variability in maintenance leads to greater production, more efficient use of equipment and capital, and greater safety. Think about this amazing stat: it takes an experienced pit crew less than 5 seconds to change a tire on a race car. Without question, they are following precision maintenance practices.

It’s time to get more precise.

The post Moving Toward Precision Maintenance appeared first on Augury.

Much of my career experience comes from the time I spent at Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo working to improve efficiency and productivity within individual facilities and across entire regions. The experience taught me a lot about how to improve overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) metrics.

Facility managers should first consider three factors when looking at how to improve OEE: downtime, waste, and speed.

When these factors hurt OEE, it’s likely because facilities are taking a preventive maintenance approach that doesn’t offer enough visibility into true machine health.

With preventive maintenance, machines spend time out of commission. That time could be scheduled downtime (when machines reach assigned thresholds for maintenance and must shut down whether they actually need to or not), or it could be unscheduled downtime (when preventive maintenance fails to stop machine breakdowns). In either form, downtime disrupts production and, in some cases, disables it entirely. It must be minimized at all costs.

Waste/scrap is another consequence of conducting maintenance based on a schedule rather than on machine health insights. Machines might appear to be fully functional, but in reality, performance issues may be degrading the end product. Anything that doesn’t consistently meet strict quality standards shouldn’t go out to the customer (but it sometimes slips through). It ends up as costly waste or negative customer experiences. Worse, that happens despite a manufacturer making a serious effort to maintain machines. The preventive maintenance approach is the problem.

Speed suffers as well. When manufacturers ignore machine health, they unknowingly risk pushing machines past their breaking point. Rushing to fulfill an order ends up causing a major setback. Alternatively, ignorance about machine health may cause manufacturers to be overly cautious, scaling back production out of the mistaken belief that the machines can’t handle extra speed. The problem is the same in both cases: Manufactures can’t adjust the pace of the line to fit the needs of production without opening the door to risk.

I’ve seen these issues persist throughout my career in manufacturing. Each instance was a little different, but in many cases, the root cause was the same: a lack of machine health data. Luckily, I’ve also seen what a factory floor looks like with machine health monitoring and prescriptive insights in the mix. The difference is night and day.

Machine Health Data in Action

A machine health platform like Augury arms facility managers with real-time data on the condition of their machines. They can use this data to address the key factors above, improving OEE for production lines, facilities, and entire regions. Here are a few concrete examples of how a data-driven approach to maintenance solves some of the most pressing problems in manufacturing:

1. Machine health insights can help remove downtime altogether

Aside from detecting failure trends, which allows for maintenance action to prevent loss, machine health monitoring can also improve process efficiency and reliability.

Imagine a factory that makes products in massive mixing vats. When mixing recipe A, the mixer runs well within the normal parameters for the machine. However, recipe B calls for ingredients with a slightly higher viscosity that’s not detected by an operator. Recipe B causes the motors to run harder to sufficiently mix the second recipe, or perhaps the mixing is incomplete. Without a platform to monitor machine health data, the operator wouldn’t know the machine was under any strain to mix recipe B.

A machine health monitoring platform, however, would record and transmit the increased vibration from the motors running harder. Using this information, maintenance teams could then prescribe a set of actions to more closely monitor the machine during recipe B, potentially being able to fine-tune it to achieve a more sustainable run rate for both recipes and preventing the recipe from continuing to strain the machine, leading to eventual malfunction or failure.

In this and countless other ways, machine health monitoring helps manufacturers avoid unnecessary downtime by replacing preventive maintenance with predictive maintenance.

2. Machine health data can help create consistency in production lines, reducing waste

One specific problem we ran into at Pepsi was labeling. Getting a label to stick perfectly onto millions of bottles is no small feat. One particular issue we noticed is that the blades on the machine that cut the labels would go dull over time, leading to sloppy cuts on the labels and many wasted bottles.

A machine health platform, however, would have flagged differences in vibrations that signaled dulling blades. Manufacturers could have predicted when a blade would go dull based on that data and switched the blades before they created poor-quality products, reducing waste and negative consumer experiences with minimal downtime.

3. A full-line view can help maximize total output

While machine health data is beneficial for individual machines like the mixer or the labeler, it can also be beneficial when zoomed out to a full-line view. Maintenance teams can combine operational data, or the end products created by machines, with machine health data to determine how the optimization of individual machines actually impacts production of the line. It might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes optimizing one machine can pull down a production line’s efficiency overall.

For example, imagine a bottle-filling machine rated for 1,000 bottles a minute. There’s a two-minute accumulation time between the filler and the labeler, which is downstream from the filler. What if production needs are such that operators decide to speed up the filler to get more cases out? The line’s controls would automatically ramp up all the machine centers to keep up with the higher volume of bottles.

Many pieces of equipment have a “sweet spot” where they run their best; these settings are called centerlines. With machine health monitoring combined with output data, you may determine that the higher speed is resulting in fewer cases at the end of the line. That’s because you’re pushing individual machines out of their “sweet spot,” resulting in more stoppages and greater waste.

A line that runs consistently will always output more product than one that “sprints” at high speeds — only to shut down when downstream equipment can’t keep up. Slow, stable, and steady always beats fast and irregular in production equipment.

In my experience, there are few things relevant to OEE that aren’t relevant to machine health, too. If manufacturers are going to take one seriously, they must consider both.

The post Lessons Learned From a Career in Manufacturing: Never Neglect Machine Health appeared first on Augury.

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit manufacturers hard. Many organizations have to respond to dramatic spikes in demand or switch production to in-demand products, all while operating with less than 50 percent of staff onsite. How can you do more with less? Here are five practical tips.

1. Create More Capacity

Tissue, bottled water, and baby care products are seeing huge spikes in demand as consumers panic-buy. Every spare minute of production in those industries must now be harnessed to produce greater levels of output.

The paper industry already runs continuous operations 24/7 which doesn’t give you much scope to increase capacity. What you can do is reduce downtime. Paper machines run with a 12-18 hour maintenance window every two or three weeks. You may find yourself doing things like deferring shutdowns and maintenance windows. In order to generate instantaneous capacity, you may decide that you can afford to forgo this 18-hour shutdown to get over the hump. Maybe next week you’ll take four hours and do a “gas and go” to get the really necessary stuff done.

In industries that do not have continuous operations, you can try to stretch the time between maintenance shutdowns. If you are running your line five days a week around the clock, you may ask people to work overtime (while minimizing social contact) to run more operating hours. If you have a major project that was going to take you down for a week or two to do a major rebuild, you may choose to skip that.

Eventually, of course, that catches up with you. The reality is once you start utilizing the top ends of your productive output curve, that extra 1% of output comes at a very high price. You’re running over time. You’re risking the failure of equipment. But it will allow you to get more capacity online right now.

2. Defer Shutdowns Safely

In the old days before we had continuous monitoring of equipment, if we knew a bearing was bad, we would do things like go from applying grease once a week to every eight hours. We’d waste a ton of grease, but at least the grease that was there was clean, was cool and didn’t contain contaminants. It allowed you to kind of limp through the problem a little bit before you have to do a major shut down.

If you have continuous monitoring with machine health, you can use machine data to make a judgment call on the risk of deferring a shutdown. I may know I have an alarm condition on this particular gearbox, but based on the history and the failure predictions that machine health gives me, I could try and run another couple of weeks before I shut down. That helps harvest every minute of operation. If you have reliable, real-time data and analytics, you’re more likely to be able to take that risk without undue side effects.

3. Use Mothballed Equipment

You may have equipment that has been mothballed because you had capacity which you can now use. That equipment might’ve been mothballed because you had excess capacity or it was not efficient or it was expensive to run. But when you’re facing a situation like this, you’re going to grab it and every other piece of equipment that’s available.

When I ran Pepsi’s Denver facility, we had three canning lines and we used to run all three. Over time, as we got more efficient, we shut the biggest one down because we really didn’t need the capacity. But there were a couple of times when we got into a pinch that we started it up again. It might take us a day or two to make sure things were back in shape or to find out who stole what part from the line, but you quickly figured out how to get that up and going.

4. Limit SKUs

Changeovers cause downtime and not every product runs at the same level of efficiency. Most changeovers take some amount of equipment interaction so you’re down while that equipment gets reset. Secondly, the smaller volume SKUs usually do not run as well. You don’t have as much experience with them, so they rob you of uptime when you’re actually running.

In the paper business, you might decide to make nothing except the four-pack and 12 pack of toilet paper. In the beverage industry, some of our lines are capable of producing both water and carbonated beverages in different package sizes. Water is generally easier to process than soda once you get going so you may decide we’re only gonna produce water. In the Gatorade operation, they produce several different sizes of Gatorade bottles. They may decide they’re not going to lose eight hours of operations for a changeover and will stick to the iconic 32-ounce Gatorade bottle. It’s the right size and we can make tons of it.

5. Reconfigure Teams

You have to develop contingency plans for how you’re going to deal with protecting your employees and dealing with a high absentee rate while still keeping production running.

Some pieces of equipment can operate with less monitoring than normal. You might have people covering multiple pieces of equipment on the understanding that you’re going to give up some response time. But if the option is slowing the equipment down, then you’ll take 50 percent output versus zero output any day of the week.

This is where it pays to know your workforce. Figure out how much of your operators’ mechanical abilities you’re really tapping into. In many locations, you’ll find that your operator rebuilds cars as a hobby at the weekend. You may have a forklift driver that’s a tinkering inventor on the side. How can you tap that talent to help you?

If you have more operators than maintenance people, maybe Rob the operator can work side by side with the mechanic because not all work the mechanics do is technical. The operator can go grab tools for them, get parts out of the store room and to help clean up an area so they can be more effective. You might create skeleton crews by taking people from your current lineup and supporting them with temporary employees or people from other roles to help you bring more shifts of operation online.

When I ran the San Antonio plant for Pepsi, we had a virus go through San Antonio. Almost half of our people in manufacturing were out. We grabbed a few temps and shifted regular employees into jobs that they’re skilled to do and what that opens up, you try to fill with unskilled labor. I ran a piece of equipment and I was a plant manager. My production manager ran another one. The supervisor was running the filler. When you have those crises, everybody pitches in.

6. Reliable Machines

The value of reliable equipment really shows up at times like this where every customer is asking you for more. The more reliable your equipment is, the more uptime you get. I know for a fact that manufacturers are starting to place customers on allocation when it comes to hot products like water. A customer might call and want a million cases. You might say “We can give you 500,000 and that’s all we can give you”. When you do that, customers don’t like it, but they understand.

The worst thing you can do in that situation is not deliver upon your commitments. If your equipment is not reliable, if your equipment fails when you are producing that order, that’s just terrible. So having equipment that’s reliable, having equipment that can tell you when it’s gonna fail, gives you the ability to really maximize your productive output and capacity to meet the customer demands that you have in front of you.

Let’s talk about what Augury can do for you.

The post 5 Ways to Maximize Capacity in a Crisis appeared first on Augury.

A manufacturing leader’s job might never be simple, but it’s always interesting. Fielding emergency calls, coping with unexpected breakdowns and searching for ways to increase efficiency are all part of the job. Fortunately, machine health technology has advanced rapidly in recent years, making manufacturing leaders’ lives easier. 

I’ve been a manufacturing leader for companies like Procter and Gamble, Scott Paper Co. (now Kimberly Clark) and PepsiCo for nearly 40 years. This has afforded me a detailed view of how digital machine health has evolved over time. 

Here are four key ways I’ve seen Digital Machine Health benefit the lives of manufacturing leaders: 

Fewer Emergency Calls

Catastrophic equipment failures used to be the top reason for emergency trips to the plant—usually in the middle of the night or on a weekend. These can be avoided almost entirely with a reliable Digital Machine Health solution.

Today’s digital approaches to machine health mean manufacturing leaders can know what’s causing the abnormal vibration coming from a drive motor, long before they’re clocking out on Friday. And generally speaking, when the line’s down the solution is usually an emergency replacement part, shipped immediately, at exorbitant cost. Manufacturing leaders are now able to troubleshoot during their workdays, instead of in the middle of the night.

Fewer Preventable Breakdowns

Most unexpected breakdowns aren’t actually unexpected—like a wobbly tire on a car, they start small, and get worse. For example, small buildup on fan blades can eventually increase until the fan wobbles so far out of alignment that it enters a critical failure—and at that point, it might even take other machines down with it. 

Preventive maintenance, changing out parts before they wear out or regularly inspecting for signs of failure, was an early way to prevent unexpected breakdowns. But it costs thousands in both labor hours and parts because prevention focuses on replacing parts on a fixed schedule, whether they’re needed or not. Plus, even a regular preventive routine can’t ensure 100% reliability, because sometimes the inspections themselves can cause failures if assets aren’t reassembled in just the right way. 

Today, digital machine health solutions help manufacturing leaders know which assets need attention, when they need it, and how to correct any malfunctions long before they become critical.

More Reliable Insights

Insights into the health of production equipment provide a significant advantage for manufacturers. Scott Paper Company knew the value of predictive machine insights as early as the mid-1990s when it initiated early monitoring techniques like infrared thermography and employed three full-time vibration analysts at its Chester, PA plant. Along with other monitoring methods, like oil analysis and ultrasonic leak detection, specialized technicians could accurately detect machine malfunctions, sometimes hours or days before they escalated into failures. But highly trained technicians were expensive, making them impractical for smaller facilities, and they could only provide snapshots of what was happening. If a failure developed rapidly, it remained undetectable. 

Contemporary production facilities stay competitive by adopting digital machine health technologies that let them know exactly what’s going on with their machines at any given time. The ability to monitor machines in real-time and gain actionable business intelligence from the data is a game-changer.

With the introduction of wireless sensors, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and digital machine health monitoring, manufacturing leaders’ jobs have become much easier. Instead of searching for the reasons behind abnormal machine behavior, they can consult algorithms in near-real-time to determine the exact cause of an emerging malfunction on a drive motor. Or, for example, they can tell if a cutter blade is getting dull, which could lead to ragged cuts and poor quality wrapping, and give technicians enough notice to replace it during scheduled downtime. 

With digital machine health, it’s almost as though the machines can speak for themselves. This creates a more reliable production facility with predictable output—the heart of an effective and agile supply chain.  

Better Outcomes

Wins from a more reliable supply chain ripple throughout the whole enterprise because outcomes go beyond simply saving on downtime, repair and maintenance costs. With a reliable supply chain, warehousing and storage costs decrease thanks to lower inventory requirements and individual facilities become more competitive by reducing scrap and minimizing the need for emergency spare parts.

When assets function in their optimal state they are more likely to produce to target output without being sidelined. This keeps stakeholders and customers happy while increasing product quality. Maintaining productive capacity also keeps sales departments happy and can lead to less demand for backroom stock at retail outlets. 

Employees are happier with healthy machines too, because no one wants to operate or be associated with poorly running lines. And the implications machine health has on operator safety cannot be understated as every employee-machine interaction carries the risk of injury. 

Best of all, when manufacturing leaders know their machines are working as intended, they can get better sleep. The job of a manufacturing leader is always evolving but digital machine health ensures they face far fewer emergencies along the way.

Schedule a conversation with a Digital Machine Health expert.

The post The Digital Machine Health Advantage appeared first on Augury.