“What gets measured gets managed.” – Peter Drucker
At Reata Engineering, we firmly subscribe to this philosophy. As part of our ongoing mission to be a digital contract manufacturing company, we leverage a number of different technologies to improve efficiency and productivity on the shop floor.
Not only do those improvements make our business operate smoothly, but they also provide customers with higher quality, more consistency, shorter lead times, and even lower prices for their complex machined parts.
A key element of our digitization is MachineMetrics’ machine monitoring technology. This software’s ability to collect and evaluate data, combined with its real-time insights, allows the team time to quickly diagnose inefficiencies and optimize our processes from start to finish.
What Information Does Machine Monitoring Technology Provide?
Machine monitoring technology is what allows contract manufacturing companies to understand how efficiently their machines are running. Without this kind of software in place, the best a shop can do is make an educated guess.
The logged time pulled from a machine simply doesn’t present a full picture of efficiency—not factoring in the time it takes to load a part or any idle time that may occur, for example.
Our machine monitoring technology, on the other hand, gives us all the information we need:
- Pulls digital information from all the machine tools
- Tracks and monitors machine spindle uptime and the number of parts manufactured
- Identifies problems and sends alerts to notify our team
- Monitors true machine time for a project
- Delivers advanced warning of machine maintenance problems
- Provides benchmarks so we can evaluate ourselves against all other competitors
How Machine Monitoring Technology Boosts Efficiency and Productivity at Reata Engineering
The best data in the world isn’t any good unless it drives action. Here’s how we use data-based insights at Reata Engineering:
- Evaluate performance. We pull daily and weekly reports that allow us to evaluate machine performance. We can then compare a machine’s performance across shifts—or even to other machines on the shop floor.
- Improve operations. Using the data we gather and evaluate, we can then make strategic improvements. If we see that a machine wasn’t running due to nonattendance, we shift our team members around to reduce idle time. This insight also helps us identify and remove bottlenecks in our machining processes.
- Predict maintenance. Each machine is on a planned maintenance program. But machine monitoring technology helps us proactively identify any issues we wouldn’t know about otherwise—preventing unexpected breakdowns and delays.
When we run our machines more efficiently, our productivity and capacity increases. We pass those benefits onto our valued customers.
Machine monitoring technology helps us make your parts faster and provide more accurate lead times. Having reliable data for our cycle times also allows us to dial in our cost more than ever before.
Don’t let shop floor inefficiencies slow down your project. Request a quote from Reata and enjoy all the benefits of working with a digital contract manufacturing company.