Angelo Hulshout has the ambition to bring the benefits of production agility to the market and set up a new business around that. Next to technical challenges, this also raises business-level questions.
There’s a lot of hidden data in factories and getting that data out can help improve the manufacturing process and the logistics around it. But getting that data out of the production equipment is a real challenge, as I pointed out last time. Not every machine has the possibility to report its activity or progress. Sometimes because it’s not built into the controller (PLC), sometimes because there simply is no controller. I’ve had a few interesting discussions about how to technically approach this, but also on how to deal with it on a business level.
Technically, getting data out of a system that has no ‘data interface’ can be a relatively easy exercise. If you have a digital controller like a PLC with a network connection, almost everything is possible. Adding a little bit of software logic will make any data item available that can be derived from data inside the controller and I/O signals coming from the actual equipment. Without such a controller, we’ll have to use a slightly different approach. We can put an intelligent sensor on the power leads of a motor or set up a camera that detects machine movement, eg to see when a machine is operational. This will help us see when the machine is ‘doing something,’ although it may not tell us whether that ‘something’ is useful production work.
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