If your manufacturing operation is like many others, you know your production lines inside out. You understand their quirks and characteristics, their strong points and their challenges. You’ve invested significantly in modernisation and automation, and have teams of skilled people analysing data to manage operations and drive improvement.
Yet there’s still that nagging feeling that your lines have something else to tell – if only you could listen more effectively. You sense there’s additional capacity hiding in there somewhere, but finding it to drive your business objectives, e.g. cost reduction, sustainability and overall operational consistency, is frustratingly elusive.
Something fundamental has changed though. Modern technology has evolved to a point where you can now tune into your production lines at the next level – not just through periodic analysis and reporting, but through continuous, real-time insights into the performance metrics that matter to your business. This isn’t just about collecting more data – it’s about surfacing immediate and actionable opportunities for improvement that have always been there, just waiting to be discovered.
Dale is a co-founder of Freeform Dynamics, and today runs the company. As part of this, he oversees the organisation’s industry coverage and research agenda, which tracks technology trends and developments, along with IT-related buying behaviour among mainstream enterprises, SMBs and public sector organisations.
