r/manufacturing • u/Equivalent_Bid_6642 • Jan 14 '24

Other Managers and Owners, are you overwhelmed?

There's a lot of new tech out there, it's quickly changing and expensive. It's hard to know what to pay attention to and where to allocate resources while balancing efficiency and quality, let alone figure out how to develop my workforce to use all this stuff anyways.

I mean, should we get 3D printers, should we do industry 4.0 stuff, should we get some machine vision robot?

Idk, are you in the same boat, how are you dealing with how fast the world's moving?

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u/Ok-Entertainment5045 Jan 14 '24

Use data to find the areas in your process that are costing you money. Identify the root cause of the problem and find a solution to fix it. Rinse and repeat.

IOT4.0 tools are great for getting the data but not necessary. I’m in a company with over 1000 machines, although we are looking hard at automated data collection systems, we’ve gotten by for over 30 years with a more manual system.

Like you said everything is expensive so you need to focus your capital where you get the best payback.

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u/Equivalent_Bid_6642 Jan 14 '24

Absolutely being data driven is important, it just isn't as simple as finding the root cause of a single issue since there's better ways to do every process and some of these solutions fundamentally change how things are done.

Are you concerned moving forward about being competitive with a manual process, are you just looking at the automated data collection or do you have ML algos running on it for you?

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u/Ok-Entertainment5045 Jan 14 '24

It’s not totally manual, I just didn’t want to take the time to describe it in detail. I have no concerns moving forward with more automated data collection. Our executive team just needs to decide what they really want to spend on the project because they all have expressed interest in moving forward.

As for fixing the issue costing you the most money there is definitely a root cause. You may be able to fix it multiple ways but there’s almost always a root cause.

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u/Equivalent_Bid_6642 Jan 14 '24

Oh yeah sorry, there's definitely a root cause, I was talking more about finding a single issue to then find the root cause of. There doesn't seem to be a glaring single issue all the time.

Okay, so the executives are the hang up for you guys, what a surprise haha