Michael Ungar explains how manufacturers get stuck running isolated smart-manufacturing pilots that never scale. The fix: expand use cases deliberately and involve the people who'll actually use the insights. A machine-monitoring system built to reduce downtime generates data valuable to quality, costing, and maintenance teams, letting multiple departments act on the same information.
One of the issues that manufacturers often get into is that they'll dip their toe into this space of smart manufacturing and they'll implement a single use case within a limited area within their manufacturing operations, and they'll kind of get stuck there. Part of what we need to look at is, you know, how do you avoid that kind of pilot purgatory that many manufacturers end up in? Part of that is to focus on expanding coverage of your different use cases over time. Part of it is focusing in on the people and so forth. But in terms of expanding that use case coverage over time, let's say that you do something like machine monitoring and your initial goal is just to see what is driving my downtime and improve that. That same information can be used for many different purposes within the organization, ranging from quality to costing and all kinds of different things so that lots of different people within different departments can utilize that same information to drive improvements in their areas as well.
