Building the bridge to Industry 4.0 solutions.
Manufacturing data guides the path towards operational improvement. It can inform decision making throughout the production ecosystem and help manufacturers understand at a granular level why key performance measures (KPIs) were or were not met. The technology commonly associated with Industry 3.0 elevated the quality of data collected during production and made it possible for manufacturers to find opportunities to improve operational efficiency that weren’t previously visible.
Industry 3.0, “the digital revolution” that began in the 1950s, has brought computing power to manufacturing, but with the advent of Industry 4.0 technologies, there is increased competitive pressure to leverage more complete production data and make process improvements faster. Traditional technology solutions too often do not capture all available manufacturing data, and routinely leave data siloed within individual factories, unintegrated software applications, or individual machines using proprietary firmware.
How can manufacturers break down these silos and realize the promise of an Industry 4.0 revolution — a three hundred and sixty degree view of their operations? The answer lies with expert data.
Expert data can improve data visibility and help manufacturers make informed optimization decisions on a global scale. It is created by collecting every piece of available production data and contextualizing it with domain expertise. This creates the bridge to automated decision making and other features associated with Industry 4.0 and helps accelerate improved operational efficiency.
Expert data’s key ingredient: event-based views
How an operation collects data matters. Viewing and collecting data as an event helps optimize processes in the factory, because production data can be modeled in a way that makes it more usable to more people in the organization. Siloed data is freed and becomes available in real time.
Key to this is transcending PLC-style tag-based machine data in favor of event data. Unlike tag-based data collection, event data collection captures every detail of the shopfloor rather than just the configured items for a particular KPI. By storing event data in a way that can be combined with domain expertise, real time and historical analysis can go deeper and get results faster.
Putting expert data to work on improving operational efficiency.
Event-based data collection relies on connectivity across every machine on every line in every factory throughout the organization. ArchFX Connectors collect every scrap of machine data by integrating with the data providers on both newer machines and on legacy devices.
Putting that data in context is the key to drawing actionable insights from it. ArchFX Broker puts today’s real time data in historical context, providing essential information on production cycles, test results, and raw materials usage. Once data is centralized and contextualized, ArchFX utilizes machine learning to address complex problems faster than engineers and operators could manage on their own. Manufacturing experts make fully informed decisions about how to make operational improvements quickly using metrics and analysis provided by machine learning — saving time, material, and labor.
Expert data results from the process of collecting event-based data, contextualizing it, and applying domain knowledge to it.
Crossing the bridge to Industry 4.0.
What can Industry 3.0 manufacturers see when they look across the bridge to Industry 4.0? Decision intelligence: Automated, intelligent decision making.
GLO by ArchFX uses expert data to identify issues or improvement opportunities earlier in the process — improving efficiency and output and reducing rework. GLO takes expert data created using knowledge from production experts throughout the operation with machine data collected from every machine, then uses it to identify issues on the factory floor and automate responses to them.
Unlike Industry 3.0 systems that require regular and consistent intervention from IT personnel, GLO helps manufacturing teams optimize process without relying on IT department resources. GLO is Industry 4.0 realized. With domain-specific alert modules and an always-growing playbook to resolve problems that created the alerts, GLO accelerates and automates manufacturing improvement – clearing the path operational excellence across every line.