What is Production Monitoring?
Production line monitoring is a method used by manufacturers to gain a comprehensive view of what’s happening in a factory, in real time. In the past, many companies dedicated specific employees to monitor their production lines to ensure products were being manufactured correctly. This allowed manufacturers to identify any problems in the production line or any errors in the products themselves. However, this gave a limited view of what was going on in one place at a given time.
Why Production Monitoring?
With a production monitoring system in place, manufacturers can use technology to monitor what’s going on across their entire facility. It provides real time data for the entire production process, from the start of production, through different manufacturing stages, all the way to final inspection. This real time production monitoring lets manufacturers see exactly how products move through the facility, so they can identify best practices or lag times and highlight areas for improvement. With the data provided by production monitoring software, managers can make business decisions to drive efficiency and optimization.
Benefits of Production Performance Monitoring
Information provided by production monitoring systems can have a direct impact on improved performance. Production monitoring systems provide data that’s collected directly from the production line to cover a wide range of performance criteria, such as product defects, machine down time, temperature, and more. This gives production managers with crucial information to make adjustments in real time as needed or develop solutions to specific issues or customer requirements.
Specialized Production Monitoring
With the increase in automation, CNC machining has become an integral component of many manufacturing production lines. CNC productivity, therefore, has become a top priority for many production managers. Being able to identify CNC productivity problems is a key advantage in maintaining CNC efficiency, and avoiding an idle machine. A CNC production monitoring system can be an extremely useful tool to help factories determine when and why a CNC machine is idle.
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Today, systems are available to provide production managers with a huge amount of production data. It’s important that the data is combined with analytics, and that the information is understandable, targeted, and relevant. Machine monitoring can play a crucial role in providing production managers with important information, so it’s critical that the software selected by manufacturing companies be comprehensive, easy to understand, and provide the necessary alerts and notifications to take some of the guesswork out of the optimization process.
