Manufacturing Intelligence: Powered by Industry 4.0

Originally published on Towards Data Science   Over the last few months, we’ve been quietly monitoring and discovering new use cases for our predictive machining product. Thanks to a streamlined operator interface, which also conveniently doubles as a “behind the scenes” labeled-data collection platform, we’ve seen hundreds of tool failures, bearing failures, and other machine failure scenarios thus far. In concert with our customers, we’ve come up with a large catalog of...

Why Digital Dashboards Matter Digital dashboards are one of the most effective tools to use for production optimization in manufacturing. With better information comes better decisions, and a real-time display of the highest priority information using a digital dashboard means that decisions can be made well and made quickly. While the data may range from simple to complex, a digital dashboard offers a dynamic visual that is easy to understand at a glance. This sort of...

What's the Relevance and Importance of Industrial DataOps? From a manufacturing standpoint, data and operations in regard to data play a role in creating and maintaining a competitive, innovative, agile facility without carrying high risks or other burdens such as excessive inventory. Having data alone isn’t enough to stay ahead—it’s all in what you do with it. As an approach to data analytics, DataOps is all about reducing the time to high-accuracy analyses using...

What is Lean Manufacturing? Lean manufacturing is a philosophy founded on a strategic approach to continuous improvement and sustainability through the holistic elimination of waste and inefficiencies throughout an organization. Lean manufacturing is more than following a set of rules—rather, it is a philosophical approach that requires changing the pervasive mindset within an organization towards one of learning, innovation, and agility. An important set of ideals to this...

In 30,000 BC, our ancestors painted stories on cave walls about their daily life, and by 700 BC we had our first printed story—Gilgamesh. Flash forward to 2021, and we have been co-creating stories together with AI for more than half a decade already. But when the order of the day is accurate business intelligence, companies want to rest assured that their artificial intelligence and machine learning systems aren’t taking artistic liberty and spitting back out a tall tale....

The slowing growth rate in the manufacturing industry and the demand for accountability from end-users has led to varying fortunes for OEMs manufacturing equipment for the aerospace industry. To remain profitable in a time of massive upheaval with multiple challenges looming, OEMs across the aerospace and defense industries must discover new pathways through digital transformation which generate revenue while extracting data. According to Eric Bernadini, business...

The Aerospace and defense industry is spinning a lot of plates right now, which has been acknowledged by the wider manufacturing world. Speakers at the FABTECH 2018 summit highlighted the challenges facing manufacturers in today’s changing environment. One observation that was repeatedly raised was the disruption of supply chains bringing steel and aluminum into the United States due to tariffs. Across the globe the situation is similar; changing political alliances,...

The future of manufacturing is reliant on an ability to develop cyber-physical systems within the shop floor which drive industrial automation, interoperability, and other optimization applications. This outlook is one where data becomes gold as the capture, processing, and transfer of data will drive every Industry 4.0 business model. Equipment manufacturers in the aerospace and defense industry rely on Industry 4.0 and digital transformation technologies to improve...

Originally published on Production Machining. If the machines on your shop floor could talk, what would they say? Would they tell stories of being cared for and maintained to the utmost degree, or would they disclose being abused or neglected? Would the turning center that broke last week explain precisely why an alarm went off causing the machine to be out of commission since then? Would it know how many parts it produced in a day or how many hours/minutes it ran last...

Machine failure, once an accepted part of life for manufacturers and OEMs, has met its match with modern technology using IoT devices, the cloud, and edge computing. In order to pre-empt and prevent machine failure, it’s first important to understand what it is and why it happens in an industrial environment. We can also review existing strategies for dealing with equipment failure including reactive maintenance, diagnostic analytics, and preventive maintenance. In...