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From manufacturing data to continuous process improvement
Reading time: 5 minutes
As a software professional and a member of the Brainport High Tech Software Cluster, Angelo Hulshout has been looking into the possibilities of Smart Industry for some years now. This spring, he took up the challenge to bring the benefits of production agility, as he calls it for now, to the market and set up a new business around that. Currently, he’s working out the plan and making the first realization steps – with first potential customers in the Netherlands and Italy.
In each 21st-century manufacturing plant, production is controlled to a more or lesser extent by software. Individual machines are controlled by software running on a PLC, a soft-PLC server or a dedicated controller. Production lines are controlled by production control software (PCS) and whole factories by manufacturing execution systems (MES). For planning and logistics, a dedicated or commercially available enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is added. At the same time, a lot of plants still use spreadsheets and written notes to analyze production performance, machine configuration or logistics planning.
Smart Industry, or at least part of it, aims at integrating these software systems and the data they use and generate into a cleverer solution. Combining all the data allows for more thorough and accurate analysis, and based on that, process improvements and cost/benefit optimizations. This can be done in the context of a single factory but also across factories, with or without including logistics.
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