Machine Data Is a Company’s Most Valuable Asset

It’s a brave new world, with Industry 4.0. Machine Builders now utilize IoT and Industry 4.0 technologies to improve their business and enable new value streams. With Industrial IoT solutions, Machine Builders improve the quality of their products and offer their clients proactive service packages. Machine performance data is your Most Valuable Asset.

While engineers have created models to show how machines should perform, access to your machine data gives insight into actual performance statistics. You can ensure constant real-time tracking and monitoring of machine health, production status, and empowered decision making with historical analysis. Engineers are then far better equipped to evaluate parameters for each machine and enable effective preventive and predictive maintenance.

Preventive and predictive maintenance 

Preventive and predictive maintenance gives you the tools to avoid or predict issues before they occur. This is also a competitive value-add that machine builders offer clients as part of service packages. How do you capture the right data and how do you use it to drive decisions in daily operations? When talking about machine data collection, you have probably heard the term “Overall Equipment Effectiveness” (OEE). OEE is a widely used analysis and benchmarking metric or KPI used to measure how well production equipment performs relative to its full potential. By analyzing OEE on machines you ensure that clients’ equipment is operating at maximum speed and capacity.

Optimize machine uptime

If an unexpected failure occurs, analysis of the collected data can pinpoint errors leading up to the failure. Operation technicians may not have been present when it failed, may not be able to identify what went wrong after the fact, or simply may not know they were operating the machine outside of its intended limits. Collecting real-time data enables operators to swiftly enact countermeasures and eliminate risks in the future. To take this a step further, correlating the data from one machine with other installations of the same type identifies patterns that predict failures before seeing any specific indications. This optimizes machine uptime and decreases operational costs; allowing you to decide where to invest improvements on components repeatedly subject to stops while saving on historically durable elements.

Organize and visualize data

The key to high quality analytics results is to invest in a platform that offers intuitive tools to organize and visualize your data. There are tools that make it easy for your team to build customized dashboards, just by focusing on what data points drive decision making in daily operations. Armed with the analysis these dashboards provide, your team can increase output and reduce downtime continually pushing for optimal performance. Once this is refined and documented, the same tools assist in historical analysis and record keeping, so that your organization can continue to evolve and define best practices.