By Matt Lowe, chief strategy officer for MasterControl.
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Any manufacturer that’s kept a close eye on the news is undoubtedly aware of this shocking trend: Product recalls soared by 115% between 2018 and 2023. There’s clearly a quality control problem out there, and it’s getting worse. The question is: What can businesses do about it?
This is hardly a new challenge. In fact, manufacturers have been trying to adopt various “error mitigation” systems for decades. But the solutions have seldom been effective. That may be because of antiquated, paper-based quality control processes that can’t keep up with the pace of modern manufacturing. In other cases, it’s because of highly customized automated monitoring technologies that, too often, have proven so costly and time-consuming to adopt that companies give up trying to make them work.
But those old obstacles no longer need to stand in the way. For the first time ever, the cost of manufacturing technologies, including implementing them, has dropped to the point where they’re well within reach of even small manufacturing operations.
Broken Promises
When manufacturing execution systems appeared in the mid-'90s, they were long on hype and short on results. They were based on on-premises computing power and typically were custom-designed to the needs of a given manufacturing plant.
The lure of six-figure price tags and the promise of adoption within a few months often devolved into years-long, seven-figure implementation nightmares. No wonder many manufacturers often simply cut their losses and turned their backs on the whole mess.
Nor were there viable alternatives. Paper-based tracking and other highly manual systems, still widely used today, can lead to preventable but uncaught errors, missing data or protracted product-release cycles—and, too often, painful product recalls. Still, as long as manufacturers’ competitors were also spending hours squinting at Excel spreadsheets and facing the same consequences, there was no compelling argument to find new solutions.
A New Paradigm
But then, roughly five years ago, manufacturing execution systems began a dramatic shift. Cloud-computing technologies have made it possible to scrap paper-based systems and quickly turn to automated approaches with modest—truly affordable—financial outlays. And by that, I mean true ROI, often within 12 months.
What’s behind the shift? A few key elements:
• The emergence of cloud-based, vertical SaaS applications: Fierce competition among cloud providers has led to a reliable, secure and fairly priced foundation for an enterprise’s biggest computational needs. At the same time, cloud technologies have grown far more useful for niche uses, too.
• Widgets, not digits: Manufacturers no longer need to engage a massive coding team to implement unwieldy, customized applications. SaaS vendors in most manufacturing verticals now offer purpose-built, no-code platforms. With these, leaders can choose from a library of widgets that target common industry issues and then assemble those apps to suit their own needs and processes.
• Industry-specific, Internet-of-Things devices: Even decades-old manufacturing equipment can be retrofitted with Wi-Fi-enabled sensors to read mechanical gauges and send data to the cloud for analysis. These can ensure real-time monitoring at every step of the manufacturing process. The market is now replete with low-cost networkable devices that didn’t exist even five years ago.
Gaining An Initial Foothold
So, where can organizations start?
Initially, consider incremental investments that can provide solid proof points. I recommend starting by implementing a digital production record system that takes paper off the shop floor and enforces data validation to reduce errors. This can be done in a matter of weeks. From there, try feeding data from IoT-enabled manufacturing equipment to the now digital production record. Organizations that previously deployed workers to record (on paper) readings from instruments and gauges can now achieve the same results more reliably and efficiently through IoT. In many industry verticals, this type of implementation can be completed in three months or less.
Such a project can make a substantial leap in the organization’s ability to prevent manufacturing errors and, by extension, avoid product recalls. The true bonus is that they’re now automatically generating meaningful data where they previously had none. That provides a foothold, culturally and strategically, in the modern realm of manufacturing quality technology.
It’s the first step in a transition toward bigger and better things—again, without breaking the bank. With front-line manufacturing sensors in place, process specialists in any given vertical can help their organizations generate increasingly sophisticated data from their systems. Armed with that aggregated data, they can apply analytics tools to run queries, predict machine failures or point to new process efficiencies.
Do Your Due Diligence
For leaders planning to push in this direction, here are two additional recommendations.
• Check every vendor’s API chops. Many players have developed proprietary IoT sensors for the shop floor. The problem is that industries haven’t yet coalesced around standards to help these machines communicate with each other. It’s up to your team to probe prospective vendors about their API capabilities to avoid future hassle and expense.
• Be sure to get buy-in from your tech-team leaders. Ideally, the adoption of new manufacturing software systems involves both the organization’s operational technology (OT) department, as well as its information technologies (IT) team. How well do those sides of the org communicate with each other? Strategically, they should be joined at the hip for this next venture.
By exploring and adopting today’s new, more efficient and affordable manufacturing quality technologies, manufacturers can begin to reverse the industry surge in product recalls. For more established manufacturers, the shift to new software and hardware technologies can also help them stay competitive with newer, data-driven upstarts. And just as important, manufacturers of all types will be able to create better products more effectively and position themselves for even greater efficiencies in the future.
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