A Guide to Production Monitoring

 

Production Monitoring Helps Save Time, Money, and Improves Processes

Production monitoring is a well-known practice that gives manufacturers a holistic view of all errors and inefficiencies that occur during production. It helps with boosting your shop floor’s efficiency, reduces shipping delays, and ultimately leads to higher customer satisfaction. 

Production monitoring collects data automatically and uses deep data analysis to provide trends and statistics on a specific machine, group of machines, production line or the entire production operation.  Production monitoring helps provide a holistic view of your entire manufacturing process, rather than a limited view.

Production monitoring can help save you time and money by improving your process and giving you data at each step in your process. 

If you realize that your production floor isn’t functioning how it’s supposed to, continue reading.

Freedom can help your factory get started by implementing a better production monitoring system with our machine monitoring software.  Utilizing shift reports, eLog software, and real-time OEE dashboards, you can have full visibility of your shop floor’s data and become more efficient.

 

What is Production Monitoring?

Production monitoring is how you visualize and record the process steps of your production in real-time. The process is done by gathering data at different intervals, showing important real-time data, and sending reports to the managers and employees alike.

From the information collected, you can analyze, and use it to make much-needed improvements to the production operations. The analytics are stored for future use in your business.

Implementing a manufacturing communication system can help keep you abreast of changes in your production operations. Some features of the system include dashboards in real-time, analytic tools, and communication features where alerts can be sent based on triggers that you set based on your preferences. 

The production monitoring system combines the use of software and hardware machine interfaces. These are used to manage communication with the various parts of the system at all times. It enables you to get the correct information from the different machines and work centers.

 

What Is CNC Monitoring?

A CNC production monitoring system enables you to have real-time connection to your CNC machines. The visibility into your shop floor production data allows you to make immediate improvements. Truth is, it’s hard to manually monitor all your machines and have full transparency, especially if you have many machines running in one or more facilities.

Installing a CNC production monitoring system will enable connection all your machines to a central server where monitoring software is installed.  The system collects information about your production and stores it in a historical database.  The information is readily available to view in a standard web browser on a PC, mobile phone or tablet.

The system tracks not only the data collected but will also notify you whenever it finds any discrepancies. The reports provided will allow you to make improvements continuously in your production operation. The CNC production monitoring system software comprises many tools that analyze and break down data into insights that you can use to manage your business.

 

What Is the Importance of Production Monitoring?

What makes production monitoring so important is that it helps provide your operation with data every step in your production.  Production monitoring also provides you with data and inefficiencies as issues may occur.  Instead of wondering why you are not producing at rate or why machines are not as productive as expected, production monitoring gives insight into every step of your manufacturing process so you can make the appropriate adjustments to get back on track.

Production monitoring helps to lower shop floor inefficiencies and keep product quality high.  This increase in your operation’s efficiencies will result in fewer setbacks, reduce shipping delays, and ultimately result in higher customer satisfaction.

 

What Are the Benefits of Production Monitoring?

Production monitoring can serve your shop floor with many benefits.  The benefits of production monitoring are:

• Full visibility across your production machines
• Increase production rates
• Improve product quality
• Increase machine availability 
• Improve communication 
• Reduce shipping delays
• User-friendly interface
• Low cost to startup
• Works on any machine brand or type

There are many advantages to production monitoring.  One of the common questions and benefits of production monitoring is it’s ability to connect to be used in any industry, on any process and with any machine. You can also connect your production monitoring software to any legacy machine with the addition of a small hardware device.  

If you already have an integrated IT system, you can connect this system to it seamlessly. Production monitoring is fast, and it allows you to communicate with your machines more freely. The system will send you real-time alerts if at any point there’s an issue with the machines in the production operation. Doing this allows you to correct faults before they cause other problems, and it prevents other problems in the future.

It’s hard to keep up with technology when new ones are constantly being introduced. But, once your system is installed, it’s easy to keep it up to date. System updates are published periodically to provide new feature sets to keep current with changes in technology and end user input. 

 

How Freedom can Help your Operation’s Efficiency

That’s production monitoring in a nutshell!  We’ve covered everything regarding production monitoring from what it is, why it’s important, and what the benefits are. Now you know just how crucial production monitoring is for your entire operation.

If you’re someone who’s interested in learning how a production monitoring system works, and how it can help your bottom line, contact us, request a demo, or even sign up for a free trial of the best product monitoring software.

Implementing one of these systems can help to grow your company and also prevent production downtime. Get started with production monitoring with Freedom today.