Economic Uncertainty and COP27 – Cutting Costs AND Emissions with Smart Technology
22/11/2022 Augury Systems Ltd
Saar Yoskovitz, Augury CEO
UK manufacturing faces a deep recession
For the last few months, warnings of a downturn have been getting louder and louder; now it’s finally happening. I’m sure you saw the news about new data from the S&P Global/CIPS UK manufacturing PMI falling to a 29-month low. Firms suffered their worst slump in new orders since the beginning of the pandemic. What’s more, the Eurozone’s manufacturing economy is already officially in a downturn.
As if that weren’t enough, COP27 opened with a warning from United Nations Secretary-General Antionio Guterres that the planet is ‘sending a distress signal’ and called the State of the Global Climate Report 2022 a ‘chronicle of climate chaos.’
What the industry needs now is ways to reduce costs while also cutting back on its emissions. Emerging technologies are one of the most important levers manufacturers can press to find extra capacity and reduce pressure on their plants.
Getting ahead of downtime, before it even happens
Manufacturers are sitting on mountains of untapped information. Each machine on their production lines are giving off thousands of tiny signals every day through vibration, temperature, and magnetic data. Now experienced maintenance workers will know what to look out for when problems happen but it’s incredibly hard to be correct in your diagnosis every time and by the time an issue is caught, you might have already encountered hours of downtime and missed production targets due to lost efficiency.
Smart machine health technology captures vibration, temperature and magnetic data from rotating machinery via IoT connectivity. It combines this information with advanced AI diagnostics and input from human-reliability experts, alerting users when a machine is going to fail, what to fix, and how to fix it. And the technology continually builds ‘knowledge’ and improves as it monitors the equipment.
By updating your technology infrastructure with AI-driven insights and continuous sensing, you can harness the mountains of data your plant produces and identify problems with almost 100% accuracy. Even better, you can detect problems before they even occur, avoiding downtime altogether.
Improving the performance of your machines can impact your energy usage and avoid the waste of product and raw materials created when equipment fails. I’ve seen companies reduce their total energy consumption by as much as 20%, just by getting ahead of problems and eliminating downtime. Looking at just one example, when PepsiCo installed machine health technology at four of their Frito-Lay plants, after one year they saved over one million pounds of food. The factories that used the technology had zero breakdowns, interruptions, or incremental costs for replacement parts.
Going beyond damage limitation
Once you’ve effectively eliminated downtime, you can start to think about the next step – what happens when your machines stop failing?
Once problems can be identified before they happen and you have full visibility into this process, you can start improving efficiencies across your whole supply chain.
You’ll be able to see exactly what you need when it comes to raw materials and have better agility to meet changing customer demands.
Doing innovation right
We’ve all worked on pilot projects that failed to take off and went nowhere.
During the onboarding of a new technology, it’s important to make sure to set concrete targets for each site that align with real business goals. Once those are reached, try to harness that momentum by quantifying and communicating every win, as well as setting the next set of adoption targets.
Once adoption success is high at one or two sites, you can roll out the use case at new plants while also addressing their unique needs and targets. Share the lessons learned as you scale and use internal and external champions to reach multiple facilities so you can engage stakeholders and ensure that workers use new technologies efficiently and as quickly as possible.
Using a connected worker platform can also improve manufacturing workflows and allow teams to be more independent in the face of disruption. The platforms should allow them to work remotely, and easily share operational data and insights.
Unlocking hidden productivity
By taking the initiative now, manufacturers can put themselves in the best possible position going into this time of economic uncertainty. By successfully adopting machine health technology, you can unlock capacity on your existing production lines, reduce waste and emissions, and change the way your teams work. In these unpredictable times, you can rely on your machines.
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Augury Systems Ltd
39 Haatzmaut Street
1st Floor
Haifa
3303132
Israel
Tel: +972-77-4395527
Email: info@augury.com
Web: https://www.augury.com/
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