DECEMBER 20208 MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTSIN MY OPINIONBy Dennis Hodges, CIO, Inteva ProductsAh­technology! That word sends some scurrying and others start salivating. We are all impacted on a personal level by technology. But, start putting the word with "and manufacturing" and there's often less current impact. Why is something so transformative often absent on the production floor? I think there are two reasons.First, there's the origin of most current technology­Silicon Valley. The focus is on consumer tech, not manufacturing tech. In fact, I've told several VC partners that if they would just start marketing their technology to manufacturers, they could increase the price and see a windfall. But, too many still just don't understand the world of 3-D­dirty, dangerous, and difficult.Operations teams must also bear some of the blame. We're too busy to look up and see what's out there. Additionally, IT is often happily distracted by corporate functions and doesn't step up to the plate. What a situation, everyone ignoring the opportunities and leaving cash on the table.Fortunately, there are changes to this mindset. The utter ubiquity of smart phones and tablets means that people are walking around on the shop floor with more computing power than most data centers had in the past. Networks are walking around with them as well. People are growing tired of writing machine readings on paper, then transcribing them to Excel or some real system the next shift or day. The ability to read the data directly from the machine into the system and analyze that in near real time starts whetting the appetite of many people.So, technology is really there to make a difference. What we as technologists must do is to be the bridge between the startup world and operations. It's our responsibility to bring options to the table. I will review a couple of these options.Smart phones are a true underpinning to what we can do. They can allow collaboration and provide location awareness. Two startups­WorkJam and Mist leverage these two components. WorkJam allows the worker who's not tied to a computer the ability to see work schedules, alerts, etc. from the company securely. Now, a plant manager can communicate with her staff­and since anyone who can afford a smart phone has one, the coverage is almost universal. Mist (among many other things) allows the individual to be tracked within a facility­think about the option to warn someone when they are approaching a hazardous piece of equipment or entering a portion of a plant that is off limits.That's just the people side of the equation. It gets really interesting when you start working with the equipment in the facility. We've been connecting to the production side of equipment for years, the side where we count how many widgets are being produced, was the appropriate torque applied, etc. What's newer is the connection to the operating side of the equipment ­ what's the oil temperature or pressure, etc. And then once we collect that data, we can start to analyze it for trends and anomalies. Sight Machine is one company that is doing that. We use Sight Machine to capture data on a production line and then build a big data environment to analyze performance and trends. They are also generating documentation for production lots to show the parameters of production­things that used to take a lot of manual time. Imagine tying environmental parameters such as ambient The Role of Technology in Manufacturing
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