I often get asked: when we make a change on the shop floor—swap a motor, tune a VFD profile, or introduce an idle‑time shutdown routine—how can we credibly say which machines actually saved energy and by how much? You don't need a fancy energy analytics platform or intrusive submetering to...
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Sustainability
Compressed‑air leaks are the "slow bleed" of manufacturing: largely...
Automation
Why I tackled cross‑plant hot failover without a hardware shopping spreeI've...
Process Optimization
I recently ran a small but rigorous pilot to prove that a smart patch — a...
Smart Factory
When I was asked to consolidate quality data coming from three different legacy...
I recently ran a small but rigorous pilot to prove that a smart patch — a thin, non‑intrusive device that detects cycle start/end and key process states — could cut cycle time by about 20% on a discrete assembly operation. I used a Raspberry...
When I was asked to consolidate quality data coming from three different legacy machine-vision systems on a production line, my first thought was: this is a perfect example of why "data" is rarely plug-and-play. Each system had its own camera,...
I often get asked how to make sustainability more than a reporting checkbox — how to turn environmental targets into operational levers that plant managers, engineers and procurement teams can act on day‑to‑day. A sustainability scorecard that...
I’ve spent the last decade deploying machine learning models where the rubber meets the plant floor: on PLC‑adjacent gateways that need to run reliably 24/7, speak industrial protocols, and survive long maintenance cycles. In this article I’ll...
I remember the first time I watched a pilot smart‑factory deployment sputter not because the machines were unreliable, but because the data couldn’t be stitched together. PLCs spoke one protocol, CNCs another, and the condition‑monitoring...
When I run pilots for collaborative robots (cobots), the primary question I hear from plant managers and line supervisors is simple: “How can we test this without breaking takt time?” Disrupting production to evaluate a new automation concept is...
When a supplier outage or a sudden demand spike threatens production, the conversation quickly turns to resilience. Over the years I’ve helped OEMs and tier‑1 suppliers translate that fuzzy idea into numbers that executives can act on. In this...
I’ve spent the last decade redesigning operator interfaces on high‑mix production lines, and one lesson keeps coming back: the best HMI is the one that feels like it was made for the person standing in front of it. When I talk about...
I remember the first time I watched a servo drive fail mid-shift: a sudden torque oscillation, a production stop, and a frantic scramble to diagnose a machine that looked fine on paper. That experience shaped how I approach predictive maintenance...
When a new product variant appears on the line — a different connector, an altered label layout, or a slightly changed surface finish — the instinctive reaction in many plants is to rebuild the defect-detection model from scratch. I’ve been in...