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Implementing Mingo

Manufacturing productivity software can help improve efficiency on the factory floor, all while increasing profitability.

With Mingo Smart Factory, you can be up and running, getting valuable insight into the plant, in less than 1 day.

What Should I Expect?

In order to achieve success with Mingo Smart Factory’s Manufacturing Productivity software, software adoption, implementation, and employee engagement need to be embedded in the process. At Mingo Smart Factory, we make it our goal to walk you through, one step at a time, to ensure success.

The first step in the implementation process begins with getting to know you, your company, and the goals you want to achieve. We’ll work together to create a step-by-step plan for success. We place a strong emphasis on coaching you throughout implementation.

We understand implementing manufacturing productivity software logistically involves training, installing hardware, and support, but the process is heavily focused on support for a reason. Technology is beneficial on its own, but when combined with coaching, and education, software becomes less of a tool and more of a solution to accomplishing goals.

Our methodology has been developed and improved over time to ensure you’re given the best support possible. The implementation team coaches and helps you along to ensure your goals are achieved.

7 Step Process

System Overview
Administrator Training
Hardware Installation
Operator Training
On-Site Support and Go Live
Dashboard Training
Weekly Meetings

Coaching & Weekly Team Meetings

The implementation team will coach you through every step along the way – you will not be without a guide or resource at any point. We stress the importance of coaching because it’s the #1 indicator of a successful implementation.

Weekly or bi-weekly calls will occur to help guarantee everything is running smoothly throughout implementation and ensure you’re on track. During these calls, you can ask any questions or discuss next steps. The entire implementation process is designed to work in two phases:

Phase One: Implementing manufacturing analytics on a few machines, lines, or cells

Phase Two: Giving you the power to scale and build on your success from phase 1

The two phases support our “Start Simple, Think Big, Move Fast” methodology. Essentially this means – start with a small number of machines to get an understanding of how Mingo can help you, set new goals as you go along, and move to implement widespread adoption across the floor or in additional plants. 

See How Mingo Smart Factory Can Improve Your Factory

Built by people who know manufacturing, Mingo provides the 21st century “Smart Factory” experience that manufacturers need to grow in a modern environment. See how it can help you drive revenue.

Questions about Implementing Mingo?

Many manufacturing analytics products have been bundled (and oversold) as a piece of a bigger ERP or plant management system like SCADA. This usually means a lot of customization, long implementation times, additional hardware, and oftentimes, special training or new staff requirements.

We’ve built a purpose-driven application designed specifically to keep costs down while providing invaluable analytics. The goal of our software is to give manufacturers the ability to stop problems and make improvements.

Overall implementation in a plant monitoring 20 machines, for instance, can take as little as 1 day. The factors that influence this timeline are based on the type of machine, the complexity of the production process, and whether you’re tracking many custom metrics beyond availability and performance. As part of the setup and implementation, we’ll provide you with many of the dashboards you care about and easy-to-understand training so you can create them yourself.

The most common Mingo implementation is direct to the PLC; most machines from the past 15 to 20 years have them. From these devices, Mingo can gather data from 100+ different protocols and begin tracking essential metrics like downtime by reason, cycle times, etc. in real-time.

In some cases, if a machine lacks connectivity, we’ll pull data directly from internal sensors and work hands-on with your IT to establish a secure network connection. A simple wireless sensor device can send data directly to the Mingo IoT Gateway.

Many manufacturers are running on older machines that either does not have a PLC or have embedded sensors but no connectivity. These legacy machines are often critical to at least one part of the manufacturing process, maybe it’s that monster lathe built in the ’60s, “Ol’ Faithful”.

In this case, inexpensive hardware can easily be retrofitted to track cycle times and downtime or a simple device can be installed to read and transmit internal sensors.

We can also leverage products from Banner Engineering who produce wireless devices with sensors to count machine cycles through vibration and other data. It’s the closest thing to a peel-and-stick sensor on the market, can cost around a couple of hundred dollars, and will begin reporting in seconds.

Through calculations on machine cycles, we can determine downtime, with manually added downtime reasons, old machines can begin to provide valuable metrics on their performance and availability.

That data can be wirelessly transmitted to the Mingo application and within a few hours, Ol’ Faithful can be happily singing machine analytics with the rest of the line.

One popular CNC machine tool builder advertises that its customers have read/write access to 6,000 data points. Another boasts that its machinery contains up to 60 embedded sensors, able to monitor everything from the spindle temperature to how much power is being drawn on the axis motors.

Like the chatty Cathy in the buffet line, these complex machine tools use a PC-based control spewing thousands of data points from the many different embedded sensors monitoring pressure, temperature, for different parts of the machine (spindle speed, anyone?). In other words, way too much information for a plant-level operational dashboard.

Since most of that is overkill for what you need to do, we’ll show you only the data you need and spare yourself the custom development you’d require to get it yourself.

Your operators provide meaningful data and insight into your operation. Capture it with Mingo.

When you’re able to view downtime and performance by line, shift, and operator, for instance, machine and sensor data within the right context will provide you deep insights into your overall plant’s performance.

To add to this, we also set up and configure manual input from your operators and users into the application. This will allow your people to add data about downtime reasons or quality commentary (e.g. good product vs. bad product). We’re one of the few manufacturing productivity applications offering this so we can provide you with deep visibility and a more holistic view of the plant floor than you have now.

AFor a typical Mingo install with 10 machines, implementation can be accomplished in as little as 3-4 weeks, more often around 6 weeks, depending (of course) on the number of machines, custom integrations, and the data you need, etc.

Every Mingo implementation starts off with a site survey. An engineer will visit your plant and survey all of the equipment you will be monitoring. This typically takes around 8 hours. The engineer will need to be accompanied by a member of your maintenance or engineering staff who’ll act as a subject matter expert and guide while they gather the make and model of the individual machines, the machine data protocol it uses, and how you’d like to see it in the system.

While the engineer is putting together an implementation plan which will define how the system will be configured and how the machines will be connected to Mingo, we’ll provide you with 3 remote training sessions to familiarize your employees with the software, so you can start using it day one. This will take 3 hours in total.

By far the biggest variable is actually connecting to the machines themselves and configuring the system to track and display the data you need. Typically this takes around 4 hours per machine, so we’ve pegged this at around 40 hours, or 5 workdays to complete. During this phase, we make sure that the data is flowing correctly to the Mingo gateway and can be viewed in the Mingo app.

Based on the 4-6 week timeline, within a month Mingo can start tracking data, but to ensure that you are getting the most value out of the software, we dedicate another 4 hours a week to meet with you and answer any questions you might have, delve into the data you’re collecting and help you use Mingo.

All told, Implementing Mingo on 10 machines takes around 55 hours of your time, far less than an ERP, CMMS, or MES system. That means you can start seeing data and the value of Mingo in about a month’s time.

 

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