Digital machine health can help your experts on the ground floor predict machine failure or underperformance and reduce unplanned downtime. But the full potential of your machine health solution stretches far beyond individual machines. You can elevate machine health’s role within your company by zooming out to get a full, company-wide view of your assets, uncovering hidden opportunities to increase productivity and efficiency in every manufacturing facility.
When regional manufacturing leaders can view every machine in all of their facilities alongside the machine health data, they get a bird’s-eye view while still being able to dig into the details. When paired with their own industry knowledge and experience, that data can help inspire change for the whole company. Having access to a full view of facility machine health allows you to compare performance, recognize patterns, uncover risks, and address those problems at scale to optimize every facility.
For manufacturing leaders, the goal of digital machine health implementation should be to uncover opportunities system-wide and benchmark facilities to make every production line perform like your best one. Here are three main ways you can do this at a company-wide level:
1. Understand your assets at scale.
When you can visualize the health of every machine in your facility, you can better understand how all of your assets work together. You can see which are your most productive lines and take note of the configuration of those machines. You can then reiterate that configuration in other lines and reduce the risk of unproven production lines.
The key here is having more precise data to give you a more accurate idea of which lines are truly the most efficient and productive. For example, you may judge the productivity of a facility by the number of products it produces — but the output doesn’t give you the full picture of how your machines are performing. If the machines in that line break down every few weeks, or if every machine is currently on the verge of breaking, for example, it’s costing you money — or will soon — and may not truly be your most efficient line.
Machine health data will give you greater insight into the actual reliability of the machines in your facilities, which can help you make better-informed decisions. If you need to ramp up production or transfer production to another facility, for instance, you will know which facilities are best equipped to handle it, and if you have to shut down a facility for any reason, you can choose your least efficient one based on real-time mechanical health and performance data.
2. Replicate best practices across facilities more efficiently.
With machine health data across all of your facilities, you can recognize your best performers and use them as benchmarks to compare your other sites against. By digging into the data to uncover why your top performers are operating more efficiently, you can use those machine health insights to develop best practices to spread across the company, optimizing every facility for maximum efficiency.
For example, a production line may become particularly strained every day at a certain time or you may notice that you need breakdowns commonly occur during a specific window during production. At that time, it’s possible that the machines are producing one specific variation of a product — a particular flavor or size, for instance. With machine health, you can dive into the mechanical data online and compare your other facilities that produce these products to see whether their machines are experiencing similar problems. Machine health diagnostics can help you uncover the root of the problem and recommend ways to fix it. Then, you can optimize those machines at a companywide level.
Instead of noticing the problem months or even years later when the machines have worn down so much that they’ve begun to lower product quality, you can fix the problem at scale before it escalates, ensuring high-quality output at every facility in your region.
3. Shift production with greater manufacturing agility.
As demand for certain products increases, such as recent spikes in hand sanitizer and tissue paper during COVID-19, manufacturers need to shift production accordingly. With asset-wide machine health data, you can easily see which facilities are your strongest and shift production to the most reliable sites.
At the same time, you can shift lower-demand products to facilities and production lines that are still vulnerable to machine failure and production risks. This can create more favorable conditions for assessing and addressing sources of risk within those machines, at a time when the company needs to maintain its manufacturing agility. Uncovering these risks creates opportunities, once again, to increase overall productivity and efficiency in manufacturing.
For the first time, regional leaders can have full visibility into every machine on their line, allowing both a bird’s-eye view and access to every detail. To learn how Augury’s digital machine health monitoring system can help you uncover opportunities, create more efficient production lines, and make better-informed decisions, contact one of Augury’s experts today.
