IN MYOPINIONM anufacturing companies are more and more relying on machines. It all started with the first Industrial Revolution and then it evolved through usage electricity, the adoption of automation until the current 4th revolution dogma based on interconnectivity and intelligence: the cyber-physical systems.Machines are and remain the highest investment for manufacturing companies, be they transforming or assembling, for continuous or discrete process, mass production or one-piece-flow. And the calling imperative is always: increase productivity!From an entrepreneurial perspective, there is nothing worse than underutilized machines: it is just like throwing the money in out-of-fashion clothes, or buying a vacation house in the wrong location.The point is that we do not know enough about our machines: we did not build them, in most of the cases, and after years of operating, we've learnt to set them up, tune them and let them run, until the next break down. And sometimes breakdowns are real nightmares, where after days of downtime we discover that that 2 part that cause the break was simply not replaced during the last maintenance run, as everybody was claiming: that will never break!!!There are then 3 main steps that every company should follow to leverage machine data and transform them in to value:1. Connect: Connectivity is the condition sine qua non to enable any data analysis approach.There are several ways to connect machines, plenty of suppliers that are offering universal and infallible connection platforms and each of them comes with a full set of functions that will fulfil any possible need.But usually there is a multitude of different machines, with different technology of different ages and so it is always a big issue to identify the right platform to achieve this.2. Visualize: Visualization of key machine data is a straightforward way to generate value: we can learn more about MACHINE CONNECTIVITY: WHERE EDGE COMPUTING FITS?ANDREA RAPETTI, VP SMART FACTORY, DATWYLER GROUPAndrea Rapetti
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