Angelo Hulshout has the ambition to bring the benefits of production agility to the market and set up a new business around that. Once we’ve retrieved the data from the factory, what to do with it?
In the past ‘few’ years, everybody has been building so-called dashboards. Be it in the form of web applications, database reports or graphs created in Excel sheets, dashboards showing the progress of key performance indicators (KPIs) have been created in every organization. In factories, people keep track of production quantities, wasted materials, unscheduled downtime, utilization of key equipment and many more data items, over shorter or longer periods.
Based on these KPIs, management decides on what should change in the factory. This often means that a deep dive is required into what’s actually going on. So, to help improve factories, we need to facilitate the correct changes being made and to do that, we need to ensure that the source of the data underlying the KPIs is clear. If a section of a factory is suffering from unscheduled downtime, for example, that number itself doesn’t mean much if no underlying data about the cause is available. Understaffing, machine breakage, material shortage – these could all be underlying reasons that should be tracked as well.
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