Today the high-volume manufacturer typically faces several challenges that are common throughout the industry. The biggest challenge is purely related to managing customer deliveries and maintaining competitive pricing when reviewed against offshore rivals. Smart Attend is designed to address these issues by virtue of notifying the entire floor and beyond issues as they evolve. These issues have varying effects on an organization, but it’s important that Smart Attend is used as a tool to help alleviate stress and complacency, by allowing the staff to benefit from its existence. Managers who use a system like Smart Attend to impose a ‘Big Brother’ style of management are not what we want. Using this tool entirely negatively can have disastrous effects on corporate culture and unity, but as these systems become more common in the industry, that becomes a challenge in itself.
Smart Attend gives customers unparalleled access to operational and production data so that they can make faster and smarter business decisions through the means of 3 channels of communication:
- Visual – Smart Attends tower light helps direct immediate attention to the machine by using an LED-based visual system. The tower-light itself can communicate the status of the machine by displaying a colour that’s related to a specific event. Customers can change these colour settings, flash speeds, and flash intervals right from their mobile device or the Web Portal.
- Audible – Smart Attends tower light also has a built-in speaker that can reach 100db of volume. This speaker can also accept. WAV and .mp3 files for custom sounds or alerts.
- Mobile / Web Access – Combining the visual and audible aspects of the system to their portal creates a truly unique and powerful communication process for customers. With their native iOS/Android App, customers can instantly log in and review the performance of their facility, the utilization rate of labour, scrap counts, overall shift performance and productivity, among many other data points. In addition to that, when the machine goes into an alarming scenario, the Smart Attend app will notify the correct resources about the specific issue.
By virtue of the Smart Attends capabilities as a real-time monitoring system and how that relates to managing daily production, the system also tracks and stores all production data that can be reviewed at any point in time. Users of the Smart Attend can drill down right to the minute of their production data or look at the bigger picture and review the previous shift, day, week, month, or years worth of information. All of it is easily accessible on the web-portal or right on a user’s Smartphone.
In instance, a facility in Murfreesboro, Tennessee that is part of a global network of facilities, tasked the company with installing the system and meeting the ROI target within the first year. Because of Smart Attend, they are now scheduling more efficiently, reducing machine downtime due to alarms mitigation, saving on costs by avoiding substantial downtime, and allowing to squeeze out more efficiency out of their facility. Most of the challenges are not related to the equipment or development, but in ensuring customers roll out the system effectively across their employees and personnel. They have spent an extensive amount of time designing their roll-out strategy, and actively support their customers on the best techniques they have learned from their own factory.
One thing that is truly exciting about being an Industry 4.0 developer is the path forward offers a massive amount of opportunities. With cloud servers becoming the norm for companies worldwide, remote technologies like Smart Attend can offer a new range of products that move this industry faster than ever before. They are reviewing a huge amount of new developments that include Connecting customers to local suppliers that have certain parts in stock for a major failure, Looking at using real-time information for not only predictive maintenance but for auxiliary system productivity and suggesting new equipment to improve cycle-times— further developing their Dynamic Scheduler to make the system more automated through Artificial Intelligence.
