Unlocking the Power of Smart Manufacturing: Insights and Best Practices for Successful Implementation

Transcript

Stan Miller:  Hello everyone and welcome to ROK Studios.  I’m Stan Miller, I’m the PR & Analyst Relations Manager for Rockwell Automation in the EMEA Region, and I’m joined by Bill McGee.  Bill is Vice President of Solution & Value Engineering at PLEX.  Bill, welcome to the studio. 

Bill Mcgee:  Thanks Stan.  I’m glad to be here.

Stan Miller:  So, we’re here today to talk about unlocking the power of smart manufacturing with insights and best practices for a successful implementation.  This is a really interesting topic, so I’m just going to dive right in.

Bill Mcgee:  Sure.

Stan Miller:  So, can you explain to our audience, how does a homogeneous smart manufacturing platform remove data silos and fragmented applications in a manufacturing environment?

Bill Mcgee:  Sure.  I like the word homogeneous in there, Stan.  A lot of companies end up, over time, building a lot of silos of different solutions.  As they grow over time, they buy a solution, the build something here, and throughout the course of doing that, they’re actually building in some complexity unnecessarily.  So, a good modern smart manufacturing platform takes all that noise out of the system, standardizes the process, and has the single source of the truth for the data and a single area to go for, how to manage that process very easily and efficiently.

Stan Miller: From your perspective, what strategies and best practices do you recommend for involving stakeholders from the beginning of an implementation process and managing change when adopting a smart manufacturing solution.

Bill Mcgee:  Yeah.  From the beginning, the earlier the better that we can get all of the constituents that are going to be involved in a project involved, to understand what their personal and organizational goals are for the project, as this eliminates the disruption along the way of surprises during the process.  So, the earlier that we can find out what each person’s goals are, what the team’s goals are and involve them in the process, the sooner that we’ll have a more streamlined approach and less surprises along the way.

Stan Miller:  Makes perfect sense.  How do analytics and reporting capabilities in smart manufacturing platforms support data driven decision making or improved efficiency continuous improvement?

Bill Mcgee:  Data consumption and a lot of data is kind of the buzz word now, right?  It seems like the companies are saying the more data we can get, the better decisions we can make.  I think the key in there though is that you want to have reliable data.  So, more data can actually add more noise into a process.  What’s really key is that the company understands that the data they’re using is reliable and error proofed.  That way the confidence in the data goes up and there’s less questioning the decisions that are made against the data if everyone’s confident in the accuracy of the data.

Stan Miller:  So, you’re speaking from a lot of experience.  Can you share some examples of companies that have successfully implemented smart manufacturing solutions and realized significant improvements, whether it’s at efficiency or productivity or waste reduction?

Bill Mcgee:  Sure.  I know a number of companies in their own right have developed best practices for years and they have a way in which they do things and they found to be most efficient.  So, one of the rules of applying smart manufacturing in a company is to kind of do no harm first. We want to make sure that we preserve the best practices they have but put a system in place that allows them to do that efficiently.  So, one customer I worked with a number of years ago was a very lean manufacturing company. 

They had a lot of continuous improvement and lean initiatives within the organization, but they had no systems to really monitor and track that they are actually achieving those goals.  So, one of the benefits again of a company like that, that they achieved was to be able to quantify the goals that they had, and then have a system to actually record that in and prove that their best practices were indeed achieving the benefits that they wanted to.

Stan Miller:  Bill, thanks for connecting the dots.  I think this is such an important topic for our audience to understand and it’s great to have you in the studio.  So, thank you for being here.

Bill Mcgee:  My pleasure, Stan.  Thank you.

Stan Miller:  And thank you for watching.  If you’d like to learn more about smart manufacturing solutions, visit www.rockwellautomation.com.