New Product Release Puts Machine Data into Context for Operations and Planning

by John Joseph | Nov 17, 2020 | News

 

In the early days of Datanomix, my co-founder Greg and I were focused on making manufacturing data actionable for shop floor personnel and executives alike. One key thing that we chose to do was hold focus groups - small meetings with leaders, operators, and supervisors in industrial manufacturing companies - to understand what voids their current data systems were failing to fulfill. We laid out large whiteboards, went through daily tasks, areas of the factory, and workflows, asking these key people to articulate for us what would be easier for them if only they had the data to help. 


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We learned that one of the big letdowns of existing monitoring and data systems currently in place was that they did not put enough context around the data for it to be meaningful - at least not without asking personnel to enter gobs of data on their own, or go through complicated ERP integrations. Our focus groups placed ‘Caution tape’ around the areas of data entry and integration. Leaders wanted their operators focused on cutting metal and wanted ERP to continue as a material flow and accounting tracker system unabated. They wanted a virtual, highly intelligent production supervisor who always had answers to common questions and could zero-in on problems without taking operators away from their stations.  

 

Focus on Job Performance 

Armed with these fresh insights, we set out on a course where job performance was placed squarely in the middle of our product, and we could add layers of insight about those jobs, the machines that ran them, capacity utilization, and cost with little to no input required from users or other external databases. We were going to derive everything by reading only the datastream from the machine controller. We wanted to make the impossible possible for our customers. 

 

It’s fascinating to watch a development team adhere to design constraints and see it pay off in customer reception. A huge credit is due to Greg and our engineering team.

 

Our next chapter

Today marks a great milestone for Datanomix in launching a major update to our Fusion Software. Three years ago, we placed some bets on the data we could transform, where to focus in manufacturing, and the fact that production monitoring had true value to company leadership. That bet has paid off in spades.

We’re very proud of the reception the product has gotten from our customers and prospects alike. The keystone for the people who use our product is job performance benchmarking, so we built the product around scoring a job on several different dimensions and being able to predict outcomes rather than react to them tomorrow. The major discovery was that factory leadership needed a guidance system to pinpoint where to apply their domain experts to keep production on target and meet customer expectations. Machine monitoring has been a red herring, because it doesn’t give any insight on what to do to improve your score. Today’s announcement adds capabilities that help operations and planning personnel to be more effective in doing their jobs in a shorter time frame. A focus on insight and task compression. 

 

It’s safe to say that we have delivered transformational data in our first generation of the product and now expand the coverage to invite other stakeholders to use our product to help them succeed. Today’s announcement adds quoting and scheduling intelligence to job performance. You can read about the details in our news release.  

 

With our benchmark data on job performance, the future is limitless. We can open up whole new chapters of insight for our customers and we can do it without ripping, replacing or retiring anything. When we demo our product to prospects, it’s not uncommon for an owner or operations leader to pause the meeting and pull in extra chairs. The response has been remarkable. Sign up for a demo to see the power of our software in action on live machines.

 

Our customers are becoming our biggest advocates. Read about one of our customers, JW Swiss,  in Modern Machine Shop: https://www.mmsonline.com/articles/datanomix-fusion-maximizes-jw-swiss-machines-efficiency

Manufacturing in America is experiencing a renaissance and we are right there along with it. Extracting value from your data is not hard because you don’t have to do it. We drop in simply and go to work transforming your machine data into one of the smartest employees you have.  If you haven’t seen that monitoring solution yet that makes you jump out of your chair, we look forward to meeting you. I promise we won’t disappoint.