Mobility in Manufacturing

Mobility in Manufacturing

It has become a need of the hour for manufacturing facilities to take measures for maximizing their resources to ensure their survival and dominance within their respective markets. For an organizations success, it is vital to provide its users with dependable and secure remote access to plant data. Listed below are the prominent advantages that organizations stand to gain by implementing Mobility in Manufacturing:

• Accessing resources from any location: “Over 67% of the manufacturing companies reported a shortage of available qualified workers”[1]. Employees in manufacturing are dealing with an increased amount of regulations and handling multiple responsibilities. They have to work with complex and expensive equipment and need the ability to troubleshoot plant equipment or monitor production status remotely. The only concern with providing remote access is providing adequate security when the employees are trying to access the plant data from the outside. This is where an effective mobility solution comes in, which adequately protects corporate data.

• Improved decision making: “70 % of manufacturing decision-makers are looking to leverage mobile”[2]. The use of existing smartphones can accelerate the decision making process by up-to-date plant data and key performance indicators to plant managers.

• Validating process efficiency: The quality assurance function has become increasingly complex. Competitive pricing has led organizations to outsource to vendors that are located across cities or around the world. When access to plant applications is available on mobile devices, the speed and accuracy of quality checks can be significantly improved, and quality assurance processes can be standardized. The automated quality of data enables manufacturers to ensure that customers receive the right product, manufactured in the right way and meets strict regulatory guidelines.

• Increased line uptime: Operators and engineers have better control over the status of critical equipment like the production line machinery, this has been enabled by ‘Human Machine Interface’ (HMI) and Data Acquisition (SCADA) on mobile devices. Operators no longer need to leave the machinery to travel to a wired workstation to input machine status information. Engineers are no longer confined to the control room to view the machine status and are able to act upon alarms remotely.

References:

[1] AutomationWorld (2013, March 1), “Mobile Device in Automation”

[2] Mutual Mobile (2013). “Mobile for manufacturing: 7 ways to benefit, from the floor to the field”