We all need more manufacturing performance data but can we afford it?

Most manufacturing plants have come to realise that to become more agile and follow a smart manufacturing methodology, capturing data from the plant assets and making sense of it is essential, “if you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know what’s going wrong,” as a wise man once said.

The perception is that deploying a data capture layer above the plant assets is going to be very expensive, actually, that is not necessarily the case and I’ll explain why.

First thing is to consider what the business drivers are, improved efficiency, reduced waste, improved asset utilisation, to name but a few.

Where are the pinch points? Can significant improvements be realised for relatively modest levels of investment?

As an aside, it is reckoned that 70% of all manufacturing performance data is already being collected at the plant assets, it’s just not all being captured.

We therefore need to know, what OT network infrastructure exists? This will dictate how easy it will be to capture this vital performance data, analyse it and turn it into information.

Once these questions have been answered, a staged approached can be taken to implementation, as long as the end goal is known and agreed with the manufacturer.

This enables budgets to be planned and allocated to each phase, meaning that return on investments can be measured along the journey.

To make this process cost effective, the data capture solutions deployed on plant need to scalable and flexible.

At Mitsubishi Electric we have a comprehensive range of data capture solutions that match all requirements and budgets.

Which system is chosen and deployed can then be decided by considering the complexity and quantity of the data, the interface protocols required and the amount of analytics required in real time or at the enterprise level of the plant.

Standard interface protocols such OPC UA and MQTT can be developed across our entire automation platform, enabling easy connection to be made to cloud services or on premise servers.

Data analytics capability can also be scaled across the automation platform from automation controller based analysis to fully blown IPC based data aggregation and full process Advanced Analytics (AA)and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability.

If you would like more information on Mitsubishi Electric’s flexible, scalable and affordable data capture solutions please visit https://gb.mitsubishielectric.com/fa