Imagine for a moment that you’re a manufacturer: you make dice, and the machines that put out your product can produce 5,000 dice per hour when they’re going full-bore. However, due to altered settings or small hiccoughs in the machinery, you produce 100 fewer dice every 2 hours. That might not be a big deal during any particular day, but over the course of a week, or a month, that takes a significant bite out of your available product and your profits.
Now imagine that you only check your numbers once a week, that’s a lot of lost energy and product you could have avoided if you’d used shop floor data capture.
What Is Shop Floor Data Capture?
Shop floor data capture is a process that keeps track of your output, and which gives you all of your numbers quickly and efficiently. Computer programs track efficiency, tally up the numbers, and send them to you over a wireless connection. Not only that, but these programs can alert you when a problem is detected. This means you find out immediately if there’s a drop in productivity, and you can examine the data over time to see what areas are causing problems.
Find Problems Quickly, Fix Them Fast
Anything that impacts your bottom line has ripple effects. If you can find the source of a flawed product, a slow assembly line, or any other issue, then you will be able to get more done quicker. Since you can’t be everywhere observing everything, Shop Floor Data Capture acts as your eyes and ears, notifying you when there’s a problem. All you need to do is to set up data capture devices, and to install a software suite that will conglomerate that data for you in a single place. Once you have that data, what you choose to do with it is up to you.
For more about shop floor data capture and how ELF Productivity Ltd can help, simply contact us today!