An Executive's Guide to Production Monitoring Software

To manage manufacturing operations effectively, the executive team cares about high-level performance metrics that determine the health of the company. They’re looking at how the plant performed on a daily basis and trends over time that indicate success. Yet, too often, manufacturers have been slow to adapt the resources that make this easy to do and instead, rely on the antiquated, error-prone paper-based and Excel reporting systems. 

Fortunately, there are innovative technologies that make reporting processes simpler and increase visibility throughout the plant. Those investments pay back over time in the form of increased productivity, increased efficiencies, increased revenue, and reduced costs. It’s a win for the operators, managers, engineers, and even the executive team. 

What Does An Executive Get Out of Production Monitoring?

Production monitoring provides greater insight for the executive team. This looks like manufacturing insights emails that provide high-level metrics that indicate if things went well the day prior. If not, those same emails provide additional insight into what went wrong and what needs to be fixed.

It also looks like long-term trending information to better understand capacity and aggregated downtime. If there are calls for additional equipment because of demand constraints, does the data support the purchase? Long-term data provides insight into the details that help make those decisions. For example, if the plant was down 36% over the past year, executives can determine if it was due to underperforming machines or another problem through contextualized insights.

Production monitoring software tracks and provides insight into the problem – whether that’s machines, processes, or people. 

How Is It Different From Other Software?

That isn’t to say reporting doesn’t exist now, but it’s probably difficult to bubble up insights to the top of the ladder. Most manufacturers have Excel and paper-based reporting, but the problem is that it doesn’t provide enough detail to make real-time decisions. 

Today’s reporting often comes at the expense of real-time decision-making. Production monitoring software provides a solution. 

Take, for example, the use case mentioned above. If the plant was down 36% over the course of the previous year, traditional reporting makes it difficult to determine and diagnose the true problem. Deciding if there’s validity in buying new equipment is a difficult decision to make without understanding the problem. To drill down into the cause requires a substantial effort from whomever in the plant is in charge of reporting – the data needs to be compiled to reflect the previous year, not the traditional weekly or monthly reports typically sent to the executive team. Then, there needs to be a record of the top reasons the plant was experiencing downtime, which is often not recorded. Sometimes, it’s just too much work, and manufacturers rely on gut feeling. Too often, there are a lot of little things that cause big problems that manufacturers don’t figure out until there’s a production monitoring system in place.

Why Should Executives Invest In Production Monitoring?

It’s not an uncommon problem to have. It’s something that keeps executives up at night; adoption of production monitoring software is often driven by a significant problem plaguing the plant or an executive team member who is used to having data in a previous role but in a new role, has no data.

When there’s a need, there’s a determination to find a solution. At that point, having a solution will make many executives’ lives easier.

The trends are clear – technology like production monitoring bubbles up key data that empowers executives to make real-time, data-driven decisions that will positively impact the success of the plant.

What are you waiting for? Get started with that same level of empowerment and talk to our team about the next steps.