How To Overcome Manufacturing Plant Floor Challenges

Overcoming the challenges of traceability, quality assurance, asset and facility management and networking on the plant floor.

As manufacturing factories continue to evolve, plant floors are becoming increasingly intricate. Therefore, factory floor managers require agile and robust real-time systems to keep track of operations and figure out how processes can be executed on the factory floors.

With real-time insights and higher visibility, managers can make better sense of what is going on and make viable suggestions to optimize processes, save time and reduce waste.

Here are the various plant floor challenges and how technology is helping organizations to manage them.

Traceability

With the rapid advancement in technology, there is no longer any need to waste time trying to locate the source of problems. The latest scanning technology, readers and sensors can now make problems solving a cinch by giving you the complete picture.

With these automated tools, you can easily follow all manufactured items, inventory and components as they move across the factory floor.

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance teams endeavor to improve the manufacturing processes to prevent the possibilities of faults as far as possible. However, there must also be a system in place to identify and rectify manufacturing faults before they turn into major problems that can damage your business reputation and image.

State-of-the-art scanners, readers and sensor tags are the key to such a system and they can help you to zero in on the sources of manufacturing faults as they arise. There is less rework involved and you can find problematic processes quickly to restore production to full capacity without a fuss.

Asset and Facility Management

As faults develop in your assembly line, you need to have cutting-edge equipment in place to help you to figure out possible causes and areas from where problems are transpiring. Mobile sensors and barcode scanners give you all the data that you need to move into the right area at the right time so that production can resume without much disruption.

You can also use data from these cutting edge tools to optimize your maintenance schedule. As a result, you will save costs on maintenance and ensuing downtimes while preventing problems from cropping up as production resumes to full capacity.

Network

IoT is more than just a buzzword or just another meaningless catchphrase. It is an all-important dimension of future plants. Network connectivity is already rising rapidly as more and more devices and hardware that used to operate as standalone devices are now going online. The Ethernet and network is creating a symphony of devices, tools and equipment that work in perfect harmony with each other. Increased network connectivity is ushering in a smart era where devices can communicate with each other and automate certain repitative decisions on their own so that processes can proceed as autonomously as possible without human intervention.

Networking technologies and equipment are rapidly evolving so that all kinds of devices can seamlessly integrate and work in concert with each other. Factory floor managers can now reduce complexity and costs through the elimination of hardware conversion. With increased efficiency, organizations can now install networks easily with less effort and time input.

MIDCOM has the newest technologies for plant floor traceability including barcode scanning devices and thermal barcode label printers. Call and talk to one of our Specialists today (800) 643-2664.