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Regardless of the sophistication of a manufacturing plant's planning and scheduling systems, many operations encounter constraints on the production floor. These constraints may consist of idle time, over-scheduling, poor process design, or several other variables that, in combination, impact efficient operation. To address these constraints and free up bottlenecks, managers may deploy several solutions. And one of the most effective is that of line balancing. What is Line...

Fixing Problems Before They Become Problems For manufacturers across the globe, preventive maintenance has long been a tool used to prolong the life of the equipment and extend their Capex return on investment (ROI). Its importance has coalesced along formal and informal lines with homegrown programs based on observation and experience, manuals supplied by OEMs, and sophisticated software that helps companies stay on a strict maintenance schedule. But while the concept of...

What is a Manufacturing Bottleneck? A bottleneck is a constraint where upstream work in batches or on a production line arrives faster than the overall production line can handle. The congestion is like the neck of a bottle, or a funnel, that creates inefficiency and drives up costs through increased handling and lower equipment utilization in downstream equipment. Production Bottleneck Examples Bottlenecks in production can occur at almost any point. They can be related to...

BOSTON, —MachineMetrics, manufacturing’s leading industrial data platform, today announced the appointment of Jon Cowan as its chief revenue officer (CRO). As CRO, Cowan is responsible for driving MachineMetrics’ growth to meet increasing customer demand for MachineMetrics’ proven solutions for manufacturers. Cowan joins MachineMetrics from PLEX Systems, which was recently acquired by Rockwell Automation for $2.2B, where he served as Vice President of Sales, and brings a...

Here at MachineMetrics, we are always striving to improve our product and add new insights and features for our customers. This is especially true as we continue to grow our market share and capture an even greater understanding of the dynamics of capacity utilization. Today, we’re excited to announce some important improvements to our benchmarking product. To give some background, all customers with more than 4 machines connected to MachineMetrics receive a monthly...

Process improvement techniques are essential for optimizing manufacturing tasks. And when done right, these optimized processes lead to greater efficiency. But what is the connection? And why is process optimization so crucial for achieving greater efficiency? The answer to this lies in the effectiveness of an activity. It's not enough to have many things being produced. The tasks, checks, adjustments, and motion required for production must be orchestrated to find the most...

Manufacturers face a mountain of challenges to produce the goods we use in our lives. And each one must address these challenges with limited resources in the form of capital, skillsets, technological advances, and more. The managers who orchestrate this complex arena best look for ways to maximize the tools they have at their disposal by understanding their shop's capacity. Better use of manufacturing space, materials, labor, and optimized equipment performance is critical...

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is often seen as a manufacturing metric. Yet it can be a financial key performance indicator for executives as well. Better still, instead of a lagging indicator showing what happened, you can turn it into a leading indicator of what will happen. You can then use it to drive the overall financial performance of your enterprise. What is OEE? Conventionally, it is a measure of how much a manufacturing facility is being used, compared to...

Using Shop Floor Control to Manage with Confidence Intelligent shop floor management is a basic premise of modern management approaches. It’s proven that optimally functioning shop floor operations have a direct, positive impact on management’s ability to ensure the business meets its production targets and that no delays impact delivery commitments. It also fosters the establishment of regular, timely, and seamless communication between an organization’s senior C-suite and...

MachineMetrics was started back in 2015 to transform the manufacturing industry with real-time data from machines. Before starting to build the product, we had interviewed about 100 small to mid-sized manufacturers, and concluded the following: Executives thought that their machine utilization rate was 60-70%, but it seemed like the actual rate was lower (later we discovered that the industry average is under 30%) ERP systems were used to track production, but data has to be...