OCTOBER 20208 MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTSIN MY OPINIONData Data Everywhere, but Not a Bite to EatBy Joe Cichon, Vice President Manufacturing Technology at INX International Ink Co.Chemical processing industry Lessons learned Industry 4.0INX International manufactures printing inks for the graphic arts industry and is unique in that we use a myriad of machines to produce batches from 10 pounds to 30,000 pounds, with an SKU count of over 500,000 unique items. We have many process machines that are controlled by PLCs and software. Some PLC systems and control software generate tons of data, but much of that data is not stored, and subsequently, it becomes lost process data information.We decided to start collecting and using our data on our processes many years ago. For the most part, hand-collected data was recorded on paper or process orders, and finally, someone would enter it into a spreadsheet or download it from our ERP. These records are helpful when we have to troubleshoot a problem, but for the most part, most of the data was not used. In the last few years, we decided to use the data passed through our machine control circuits and PLCs to help optimize our equipment. When we investigated options, most vendors we approached, estimated costs of about $40,000 to $80,000 just to give us an assessment.In two cases, the assessments came in between $190,000 and $400,000 at just one of our seven major plants.Our business based ERP data helped manage and plan our business, but we needed detailed process data. We discovered early on that using SAP (our ERP) to process machine data was extremely expensive, and the cost to configure the software was estimated in the mid 6 figure range. We had machines in our plants that controlled equipment and logged the data, but the problem was that no one in operations knew how to access the machine data. It was just consuming bits on a hard drive somewhere or just evaporating into space for the most part. The data that we collected helped engineers
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