What is Real-time Planning?
Real-time planning is the ability to deal with unforeseen circumstances or changes in real-time, with the capacity to make adjustments or pivots that are necessary, without completely disrupting the production process. To implement real-time planning, there are certain things that need to be in place to help monitor scheduling, downtime, equipment efficiency, product quality, and logistics.
Why Real-time Planning?
At the basis of real-time production is a robust data analytics capability. In order to track what’s going on in the manufacturing facility, it’s crucial to capture machine data in real-time, with the ability to analyze it comprehensively. The insights from the machine data can help operators flag any issues, make adjustments, and put remediation plans into play. The more data streams captured the better, as this ensures comprehensive data is being generated for real-time manufacturing analytics.
Benefits of Real-time Planning
With manufacturing real-time data and analytics, production facilities are able to address issues related to speed, scale, efficiency, and quality across the manufacturing process. This optimization can be a major catalyst for business growth, as it helps improve the quality of decisions across the demanding and competitive landscape of today’s manufacturing companies.
How it Works
Today, there are a wide range of technologies available to ensure comprehensive data collection in a manufacturing facility. Whether it’s IoT sensors, RFID tags, or smart pallets, these technologies present manufacturing operators with a range of options for broad data collection to ensure widespread coverage of what’s happening in their facilities.
This real-time operational intelligence contributes data from both ends of the supply chain, allowing for rapid adjustments to be made. This can impact everything from the production process to real-time path planning for robots, where engineers and plant managers having the ability to continuously track their networks, so they know where support is needed and where changes need to be made to keep the production process operating smoothly.
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One of the advantages of a real-time planning model is the ability to identify patterns, trends, and predictive insights based on the data. This helps companies keep track of their metrics and KPIs, and consistently work towards meeting their business goals, while making adjustments on the fly and managing downtime effectively.
Of course, for real-time operational intelligence to be effective, the data flowing in from different networks, systems, and machines has to be coordinated and integrated so that managers can make smart decisions based on all the data, across the value chain. It’s important for a manufacturing facility to find the right technology that works for them, so they can gain comprehensive, real-time planning data for their production process, enabling them to make smart decisions aligned with their business goals.
