Meeting Industry 4.0 and OEE Goals with Real-time Analytics to Increase Factory Performance in the Metal Processing Industry
The metal manufacturing and processing industry is projected to grow 3% globally over the next few years. The industry is constantly adapting to a wide variety of variables, including increasing customer demand, an aging professional workforce, increasing prices of raw materials due to tariffs, and metal fabrication becoming increasingly outsourced in order to decrease costs.
As the metal manufacturing industry adapts to the future, it requires both manual and automated processes, as well as a high level of safety and security to comply with the industry’s strict requirements. To meet these modern challenges, this industry is starting to integrate applications and supply chain management software like CRM, ERP, PLM, MES and SRM, and take advantage of innovations like IoT, automation and robotics to improve performance.
To remain competitive, metal manufacturers need to increase productivity and improve production quality in order to meet customer’s specifications while reducing unit costs. Investing in digital transformation allows businesses to gain better control of processes while ensuring better tracking of feedstock, with steel and aluminum being key materials. To achieve these goals, manufacturers must achieve end-to-end visibility of their processes.
Digital Transformation in the Metal Manufacturing Industry
In today’s competitive market, decision makers at all levels must be equipped with the best intelligence to make the right decisions at the right time. This process begins with collecting data from each machine on the shop floor and consolidating it into meaningful information for different levels of the organization. The goal is to deliver contextualized actionable information to shop floor managers and top-level executives in real-time. To do this, you need to implement digital technology that revolutionizes your factory through a series of adaptive changes.
How FactoryEye Transforms Performance in the Metal Processing Industry
FactoryEye is an affordable and flexible Industry 4.0 solution for mid-sized manufacturers that transforms data into actionable intelligence and provides visibility from the shop floor to the top floor. It supports monitoring of the entire process to enable metal manufacturers to achieve objectives such as:
- Adopt digital tools for more advanced production planning and higher productivity, which in turn increases availability and improves capacity use.
- Reduce production losses via automation and save on costs by detecting production deviations and stoppages before they occur, while also reducing raw-material consumption.
- Shorten both planned and unplanned downtime to ensure higher equipment availability while making maintenance work more efficient by digitalizing predictive maintenance procedures and remotely monitoring equipment.
- Use energy more efficiently by monitoring equipment consumption, collecting and analyzing data to predict inefficiencies that manufacturers will utilize to significantly improve metal processing performance.
- Seamless connectivity of key information systems like ERP, MES, PLM and QMS enables optimization of production planning, scheduling, procurement, and logistics.