A manufacturing client's ultrasonic welder was failing monthly at $30,000 per failure. A data dashboard revealed the real culprit: cycle time creeping from 1.0 to 1.2 seconds, signaling tip contamination. Proactive cleaning based on the alert eliminated the failures.
Once you deploy something and show that, hey, look at what we could do with this new data, right? I've taken an example of when we first started our consulting thing. We went to a company that was having an issue with an ultrasonic welder. And the maintenance team there was having all kinds of problems with this thing. They were losing one of these a month for— they were like $30,000 apiece. And they were blowing these up like once a month. Wow. And they couldn't quite figure it out what was happening. So we deployed a little bit of technology, started collecting data. And just with a simple dashboard, we could see right away within the first 24 hours of connecting that data in that the problem was the tips were getting dirty on this ultrasonic welder. And we could see that because the cycle time would start to ever so slightly increase to the point where it was just kind of a straight line break. And so we could see, you know, your cycle time was standard 1 second, now it's 1.1, now it's 1.2, now it's 1.3. So we now gave the maintenance team this tool. Hey, here's your alert metric, right? When you see this thing start to creep up, go clean that tip and you don't have to blow through these. Once a month. And I think that, that type of conversational effort is what gets that buy-in that you need.
