Written by Infraspeak team! We live in the era of Industry 4.0, which is the revolutionary digitalization of manufacturing that involves Big Data, which is the concept that studies all the data gathered and managed. And managing and generating data are a crucial part of this process in all companies.  Why generate data? A well-run, efficient and productive company relies on data to achieve greater goals. But why? Well, there are a lot of perks in doing that: Decision-making One of the toughest and more stressful tasks leans on decision-making. Insecurities creep in and the human mind gets in the way. And how to avoid this situation? Analytics and data. By generating data, decision-making almost becomes a mathematical and analytical question. Depending on the industry, data can reveal essential intel regarding your own company, the field in general or global traits that can boost its efficiency. Harnessing data can, for example, help you find and retain new clients, improve your customer experience, predict new trends, enhance your marketing strategy and even track social media and its potential. Problem-solving Besides relieving you of making hard decisions on your own, it also helps you with solving problems. No company…

Post wrote by Infraspeak Team. The technological world has been flooded with concepts and new topics  - and it’s normal to get lost in the midst of it all. Let’s focus on one of its highlights: The Internet of Things (IoT). We’ve all heard about it, but do we really know what it means? In the simplest terms, the Internet of Things comprises all stuff that connects to the internet, enabling all devices to gather information, analyze data and even take action. As Caroline Gorski, the head of IoT at Digital Catapult assesses: “it’s about networks, it’s about devices, and it’s about data”, it works as a “brain”, streamlining, enabling connectivity and warranting communication between everything internet-related. It’s considered one of the most critical and encouraging concepts of our time. To put in perspective: researchers estimate that is over 20 billion devices are connected and this number will increase as the world becomes “smarter” and “smarter” (not literally, just conceptually). With this technologically-driven world, concepts such as Smart Buildings (providing unique comfort and productivity in workplaces, for example) and Smart Cities (reducing environmental footprint, relieving the people of time-costing and stress situations by improving transportation, and increasing…

Does Your Packaging Manufacturing Plant Know Its Scrap Rates? In which stage of the scrap reporting are you? Alongside downtime, scrap rates (or waste) are a major concern for any plant manager, especially in the packaging industry. Although the numbers vary greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer, when we look at in-line production facilities (where all machines are connected in series), scrap rates of 15-25% are completely normal. During this time, the plant is consuming energy, raw material and equipment uptime. This means that for every 4 hours of production, the company is throwing material, energy and equipment time in the bin. The struggle to reduce these numbers is hard, daily and constant, and only one thing is for sure: you cannot do it without reliable production numbers, just by looking in the rearview mirror. Although almost every piece of equipment has integrated counters for rejected parts, few companies collect this data automatically to transform it into intelligence. As a result, they end up depending on manual notes, the nightmare of information reliability. Anyone who has spent a few hours on the factory floor knows: the life of an operator is not easy. The routine of production, quality…

Manufacturing companies are full of very smart people: engineers, technicians, skilled operators, maintenance people and so on. So, sometimes DIY (Do It Yourself) is the way to go to solve many problems in the company.This is not different when it comes to analytics systems for the production (sometimes called MES systems) and this is a valid approach. Software development is hard, but we must say that some companies are successfully doing it. Here we try to enumerate some of the mistakes that are normally made by manufacturing companies when trying to develop their own systems. 1. Since we are already doing this, we could as well… This happens in house renovations as well: we start wanting to replace the floor tiles, which would take us one month, but end up breaking walls. Since we are breaking the walls, we could as well remake the bathroom, and so on.Normally a project for production metrics at a company starts with: “let’s just add some sensors and save them on an SQL database, and we already know production, uptime, and speed” ( and that is a nice way to start ). But then new demands come: “how do we know the production…