When can I expect results from Production Monitoring software?
By John Wright
You’ve decided to implement a production monitoring system like Glassdome, and if you’re going to justify that investment, you need to know when you’ll see results.
Knowing that production monitoring software is important is step one. Now you need to sell a roadmap of when your team can expect to get real success.
0 – 3 months after deployment
In the first three months of your deployment, you’ll be focused on setup. Getting your implementation done correctly, interfacing with all of the necessary machine drivers, making sure your dashboards are working as intended.
You might be surprised to hear that we often see results even in this stage.
Any high school physics student can tell you about the observer effect, famously demonstrated by the double-slit experiment. The idea is that you can change an outcome simply by measuring it.
Once companies start measuring output and talking about production monitoring, efficiency and quality increase even before they change any processes.
Once employees know that their lines and shifts are being watched, they start changing their behavior for the better, leading to better company-wide performance.
3 – 6 months after deployment
From three to six months after deployment, we begin to see major improvements in metrics like OEE, quality, and downtime.
The behavioral change that started in phase one is ingrained, and shift-to-shift and line-to-line comparisons are beginning to create real comparison and competition.
You might be ready to start tweaking how lines are configured to solve glaring issues.
The roots of quality concerns are beginning to become apparent, and get fixed. Things like ovens leaking heat or machines vibrating too much are found out (See our Lotte Wellfood case study for a real-life example).
Quality control and maintenance starts getting automated, allowing you to redeploy manpower from costly manual tasks to value-added production work.
One year plus after deployment
A year from deployment, you’re seeing real production monitoring results and substantive changes in the metrics you care about.
You know where you need to invest to make the biggest changes in production. You might change your investment mindset from “let’s throw another machine at the problem” to targeted, more cost-effective solutions.
Predictive maintenance lowers your unplanned downtime, and dramatically cuts the amount of time your technicians spend just making sure things are ok.
Staff turnover begins to bite less hard as your knowledge base is transferred to the system and turned into actionable content (see our blog on visual factories).
You’re finding new opportunities to grab data points and get an even deeper understanding of your production process.
In short, you have a lasting edge on the competition that will only get stronger with time.
How can I start seeing Production Monitoring results?
Look for a real-time solution that gives you a view of your whole factory.
Glassdome helps you get more data and more insight into what is happening at your factory with no production disruption.
Interested in learning more about Production Monitoring?
Talk to a Glassdome manufacturing expert.
