Tools & Technologies

By Lori Tyler

Mobile monitoring Tends to help production

A manufacturing site's competitive advantage resides in its ability to recognize patterns and decipher root causes inside complicated systems.

Successful sites must lean manufacturing by developing a culture that addresses root causes and creates process changes to remove, limit or influence those root causes in small, continuous improvements. Operations have begun to rely more on process improvements to increase value and decrease waste in their system.

Traditional manufacturing relies on statistical process controls to monitor performance and keep processes from trending out of limits.

However, the onset of high-speed manufacturing, complicated systems and tighter specifications has made this analytical process more difficult for businesses to control.

Tend in.control is paving the future of process control systems by implementing an artificial intelligence (AI) component to its software. Rather than integrating the software to gather and track data with various types of manufacturing systems, Tend in.control takes in visual data from a robot at any production line and learns to read visual cues that indicate whether an issue exists.

The software will be able to kick off an error message to a mobile monitoring platform, notifying the employee in charge about the problem. The visual component and error response helps determine the root cause of an issue on a production line more quickly. These factors can decrease the lead-time in discovering and responding to issues. The software's monitoring system and error notification system can bring continuous improvement opportunities to all lines throughout a plant, increasing uptime.

In conjunction with the tool's AI technology, Tend in.control maintains monitoring capabilities from mobile platforms. This feature allows employees to monitor production lines from any location at any time. A dashboard allows employees to view a snapshot of the plant's system-wide operations.

The software also has the capability to store massive amounts of data to the cloud for a monthly fee, where the information, too, can be retrieved from a mobile platform at any time. While this tool will allow for more flexibility among employees, it also suggests that less overhead would be needed to manage line operations, reducing labor costs.

Tend in.control can help companies increase their bottom line by improving processes to maintain quality production levels, increase customer loyalty and reduce labor costs. By identifying issues in a line faster, the plant can improve current processes to decrease downtime and rejects, improving customer relations and loyalty.

With better processes and a more mobile system, employees can provide support while being off-site.

This can lead to better work-life balance and lower turnover rates. With Tend in.control, a company has the potential to increase value and decrease cost by improving system processes one step at a time.

Lori Tyler is a productivity analyst at Northside Hospital and a member of IISE's Young Professionals.