Michael Dedrick

One of the greatest benefits of my job is the opportunity to be in front of the customer the very first time they look at the Plantnode reports. It’s the expressions on their faces – sometimes shock, sometimes concern – but mostly amazement. Before implementing some type of performance monitoring solution it is not uncommon for folks to think they’re running as efficiently as possible, more so, that they’re running a tight ship. They may have some downtime periodically but the assumption is they are already at the limits of their production capacity…

…then they see the Machine Status report.

Imagine you have the tools to monitor daily production on a minute to minute basis.  You can see how often your assets are running and how often they’re not. You are able to respond to issues immediately, as they occur. If you could see how much downtime truly occurs in a full day and how much it greatly affects your productivity, all in real-time, you’d be amazed. Maybe the issue is start up time, maybe it’s break time creep, or maybe it’s maintenance response time. Whatever the case, a few minutes of lost time over the course of a full day can certainly add up. How much money could you potentially save, or how much more production could you gain in a week, a month, or even a year?

To answer that question I need to share an experience I recently had with a well known pharmaceutical company.  A month after Plantnode was installed, I had the opportunity to present the monitoring results for two tablet-packaging machines.

Now – this customer was aware they had inefficiencies in their process, but despite a looming recession they were still running at what they considered full capacity. I distinctly remember their faces when they saw all the idle time. It didn’t make sense to them.  How could they be running at capacity when they were struggling with at least ten to twelve minutes of downtime an hour? Some hours their machines hadn’t run at all – what exactly constitutes “capacity” at that point? Comparing the Machine Status and Production reports our customer could clearly see how all that idle machine time directly affected their output and how overlooking “a little bit of downtime” could quickly turn into huge losses in productivity.

Plantnode provides insight. It gives our customers the ability to really see where their inefficiencies lie and how greatly these inefficiencies impact their business. In this case the customer realized exactly how much time and production they were losing and when exactly it was occurring, down to the very minute. While the initial reaction may have been complete surprise, the results of this business case were even more startling – if the customer could eliminate just 15 minutes of downtime per shift this translated to a benefit of approximately $33K in just one month. And that is just a 3% improvement in efficiency!

If you had the opportunity to gain that much insight into your process, how much would you benefit?