MiTek

Douglas Krauss

I’ve spent my career working in a variety of manufacturing roles. Here’s what I’ve learned: Knowledge is key. I believe it’s crucial to the success of any organization that performance is accessible by all functions within the organization. Your team members must have knowledge and understanding of the goals of the organization and be able to track their progress toward meeting those goals or falling short of them.

I have spent over 10 years in various manufacturing leadership roles. During that time, I focused very intently on data intelligence in coordination with continuous improvement. Manufacturing intelligence (MI) refers to software systems that integrate different sources of operational data for the purpose of deeper analytics, reporting, visual summaries, and the sharing of data between enterprise-level and plant-floor systems.

At MiTek, we track several metrics within several areas of our business and have connected them using different systems to bring dashboards to life.   At our company, we utilize an ERP system, planning software, safety software, maintenance software, and a suite of business tools.  Within manufacturing and sourcing, there is an endless amount of data that can be collected.  The key is to determine what will drive the right business decisions and the overall performance of the company. 

“Manufacturing intelligence empowers your business to quickly see how each process, plant, or region is performing and react and share across plants and borders to achieve business results and make continuous improvements.”

Production metrics are critical to track both process and equipment performance.  These metrics connect production equipment to our ERP system for verification.  We also use the IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) to collect live data from equipment and provide Manufacturing Insights.  Lastly, we monitor the performance trends of equipment to help standardize best practices.  All this together provides data for better resource management (labor and equipment).

Aside from production metrics, there are several other key areas where MI can assist MiTek leaders in making more informed decisions.  For example, within equipment maintenance, we execute our preventative and predictive maintenance based on equipment usage instead of time.  We also have virtually real-time work orders and spare part inventory. Another area is quality.  We use MI to immediately detect bad parts to prevent rework or bad parts getting to the customer.  We then use IIoT to push quality data to maintenance software to identify focus areas for repair.  These are just two examples of the MI we use at MiTek.   

MI is empowering a new era of manufacturing.  This era will not be constrained by a lack of live data, which gives leaders a much quicker response time to issues as they arise.  By integrating enterprise-level systems, MI has the conceivable ability to transform how products are produced, shipped, and sold globally.