Walk into most distribution centers and manufacturing
facilities with automation and you will hear a cacophony (my $5 dollar word) of
screeches, alarms, bells and grinding.
You will see indicators, status lights, digital displays, stack lights,
power displays and a host of visual means of understanding your equipment and
its performance.
With this bevy of sight and sound stimulators, we ask our
operators, supervisors, maintenance technicians and front line managers to know
what’s going on and to keep production or distribution running at max
efficiency. When a piece of equipment
fails or cases jam or someone in the 500,000 sq ft facility pulls an e-stop,
hopefully by accident, we expect immediate resolution of the problem. After all, we spent good money on this
equipment and it should perform as advertised.
If you look at the technological advances in the devices we
use at home, we see the migration to appliances with the ability to communicate
with each other and with you the homeowner.
Ultimately, the goal is for the ultimate convenience of knowing the
status of our home equipment and adjusting the settings to make our lives
easier and more comfortable….this is debatable but that’s for a different
blog.
However, shouldn’t we have a central means of understanding
what is going on with our distribution center and manufacturing
automation? Are you using the tools
available with Human Machine Interface Software to simplify identification of
issues such as jams, emergency stops, full lines, motor failure, faulty
photo-eyes, and a host of other typical issues?
Are you tracking and reporting diverts statistics, full divert line
times, successful scans and bar code quality?
Most importantly, are you managing your equipment so you can see things
that will happen in advance, use your associates properly, and measure the
performance of your equipment?
I don’t want my refrigerator communicating with me but I
wouldn’t mind my distribution center or manufacturing facility telling me a
thing or two. How about you?
