Sunday, November 23, 2014

Your Data: Use It or Lose It -- Canadian Industrial Machinery


Joe Thompson wrote a very nice article in Canadian Industrial Machinery titled Your Data: Use It or Lose It

The beginning of the article lays out the real challenge:

"In many shops, machinists track machine usage using a paper form. At the end of each job, or at the end of the day, they write down how long the machine was running and how much time was spent on setup. This enables management to bill the correct amount of hours for a certain job. 
While this can produce the information necessary to create an invoice, the results – when compared to the actual, measured data – can vary tremendously. 
“I think shops would be very surprised by how much variance there is between their recorded uptime, for example, and the actual data,” explained David McPhail, president and CEO of Memex Automation, Burlington, Ont. 
Memex Automation has developed technology that collects real-time OEE information no matter the make, model, or vintage of the machine tool and creates reports, also in real time, that companies can use to optimize manufacturing processes."

David McPhail, President and CEO of Memex does a great job explaining OEE:

"So what exactly is OEE? 
“Through data collection and analysis, OEE can tell us how efficiently a machine is running. This type of data collection isn’t new, but what we are doing now is taking the guesswork out of the equation, collecting the data automatically, and exporting the results in easy-to-understand ways,” said McPhail. 
McPhail described OEE as a formula with three components: 
1. Availability (run time divided by total time, which includes downtime). 
2. Quality (good parts produced divided by total parts)  
3. Performance (desired part-to-part time versus actual part-to-part time).
Essentially, OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality. 
“A world-class OEE is 85 percent,” explained McPhail. “By comparing this optimal level with your current level, you can clearly see where your room for improvement lies. By using OEE software to collect and track data over time, you can also gauge how successful any changes are.” 
By tracking this data, shops can compare the actual effectiveness of equipment with the desired effectiveness. 
“Managers can find out pretty quickly if the machines are being utilized effectively,” said McPhail. “In some cases they can even find capacity that they didn’t know they had. It’s very simple: Machines are expensive so they should be used as much as possible to get the best possible return on investment.”

New York City to Offer Free Gigabit Wi-Fi in 2015


This is phenomenal.

As the article by  Arik Hesseldahl at states:

"New York City today unveiled an ambitious plan to roll out a free city-wide municipal Wi-Fi network that officials say will be the fastest and most wide-reaching network of its kind in the world. 
At a press conference at City Hall, the city unveiled LinkNYC, which will rely on thousands of kiosks that will be deployed at locations currently occupied by pay phones. The kiosks will be installed in as many as 10,000 locations throughout the five boroughs and will offer Wi-Fi service of one gigabit per second within a radius of 150 feet. They’ll also offer free domestic voice calls to all 50 states. The first of the kiosks is expected to begin service in late 2015."