Preparing Manufacturing Data for AI
Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI and ML) have incredible potential for putting huge amounts of data to work for smarter decision-making, forecasting, and production improvements. We are getting better and better at figuring out how to leverage AI across more industries and applications, but challenges still remain. Data collection and preparation are the biggest of these challenges.
Manufacturers eager to embrace this emerging technology are in luck because they have been capturing and using data from their lines for a long time. Many are embracing other modern technologies such as IIoT and smart factories. Now is the time to put their data to work with AI, but it will require significant changes to processes and standards.
Understanding the state of manufacturing data
Manufacturing machines are streaming huge amounts of data from the shop floor to storage, but this data is messy. Data is generated by many personnel, systems, and processes without consistent methods and policies.
Machine learning requires well-prepared, consistent, and clean data that is accurately tagged with context and relevance. This preprocessed data is fed into a machine learning model to train it—updating its internal parameters until it is able to identify and predict new data accurately.
However, without practices and policies aimed toward ML, the data collected is not ready to be used for training.
What do manufacturers need to do to their data?
To get their data ready for AI, manufacturers need to ensure that their data is collected, processed, and stored in a consistent and normalized way. To facilitate effective training, it’s crucial to tag data accurately. Consistent and normalized data allows for easy tagging and utilization. Manufacturers should adopt standardized procedures for organizing, collecting, and storing data. This ensures a seamless flow of high-quality data, supporting continuous training and improving the performance of AI applications.
Taking the next step.
Arch believes that the future of manufacturing will depend on AI and ML. The ArchFX Broker securely standardizes and preprocesses machine data. Along with providing real-time reporting and valuable insights on that data, ArchFX data is well positioned for training AI/ML models. We are ready to help manufacturers prepare for this future by adopting and leveraging the latest in data collection, storage, and preparation solutions.