Category

Manufacturing

Mar 31
The Furniture Factory (Bumpei Usui, 1925)

Design Collaboration in the Age of Pandemic

By Manufacturing, PLM No Comments

The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing key business activities to a near absolute halt. If you work at a product organization, activities that used to be routine such as a team meeting for a critical design review or sending a team of experts to walk the plant floor to investigate a product manufacturing quality problem are no longer possible.

Overnight, overly lean single-source supply chain strategies and hyper-speed agile product development practices exposed the fragility of many organizations’ supply chain practices.

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Mar 25
The Kitchen (Pablo Picaso, 1948)

How Many ECOs are Preventable?

By Manufacturing No Comments

Engineering change orders – ECOs, ECNs, ECRs, whatever you call them—are a key activity during design and volume ramp up stages and continues well into the product’s useful life. In many organizations, ECOs are the heartbeat of the product development process, indicating how well the product organization defines and implements requirements, follows design guidelines, understands and implements manufacturability best practices, and meets stringent quality standards. I have worked with manufacturing companies that use the ongoing number of ECOs as a measure design maturity and an indicator when the design is ready to start transitioning to manufacturing. I disagree with this methodology, but that’s a subject for another blog post.

Fundamentally, ECOs reflect errors in requirements definition, design or manufacturing. They represent waste in the product development process. ECOs are disruptive and resource intensive, and mature organizations should make an effort to minimize the frequency and impact of ECOs.

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Mar 11
La Reproduction Interdite (Rene Magritte, 1937)

Industrial IoT – A Five-Year Perspective

By Internet of Things (IoT), Manufacturing No Comments

Yes, I know, one should not predict the future from history. But I recently came across a Forbes article from five years ago and thought that as we take stock of the last decade and starting a new one, it is worth visiting.

In 7 Lessons from the Internet of Things Frontier, an Oracle marketer claims that 90% of the companies looking to launch an Internet of Things initiative want their system delivered via cloud software and infrastructure. The author offers seven insights, presumably based on actual customer implementations, which are summarized below along with my comment.

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Nov 28
Intosite Automotive Factory Twin

Siemens Intosite – Go Digital, Go Visual

By Internet of Things (IoT), Manufacturing No Comments

The Allure of Radical Digitalization

Fueled by ubiquitous connectivity, cloud-stored data lakes and artificial intelligence-based analytics, Industry 4.0 promises to create smart factories in which interconnected manufacturing systems communicate, in real time, with production machinery, robots and human operators throughout the entire value chain.

The digitalization and automation of factory floors and supply chains give manufacturing organizations an unprecedented insight into their manufacturing operations and product performance. Rich information from plant floor equipment and advanced analytic tools help manufacturers optimize manufacturing operations and improve manufacturing capacity, yield and quality. And as manufacturing companies in the industrial world continue to battle a growing shortage of skilled workforce, pervasive digitalization and advanced optimization help streamline operations and maximize efficiency and resource utilization.

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Nov 18
Wine is a Mocker (Jan Steen, 1663–64)

The Industrial Internet of Things: When the Party is Over

By Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Augmented / Virtual Reality, Internet of Things (IoT), Manufacturing, Mergers & Acquisitions No Comments

IoT Industry Snapshot and Predictions

The industrial Internet of Things community is finally beginning to sober up from the bacchanalia of counting connected IoT devices and terabytes of cloud data storage that has dominated the IoT narrative for too long.

IoT platform vendors and consultants are shifting their focus from the lower rung of the IoT technology stack that focuses on device connectivity to the other end of the stack, to technologies that provide meaningful business value: multidisciplinary data aggregation, complex data analytics and higher capacity for optimal decision-making.

Robust articulation of the business value of industrial IoT has been absent from much of the narrative, in the vein of “if you build it, they will come.” Many IoT platform vendors provide tools to draw snazzy dashboards, plot complex data graphs and display virtual gauges. But their data analytics tools are not as robust and trending and predictive capabilities are over optimistic. And the recent rush to add statistical analysis tools (often linear regression tools masqueraded as artificial intelligence and machine learning) will face real-world challenges of data biases, inconsistency and scale. Read More