Are you a food processor who produces for commercial food service? Are you a fresh produce packer that sells to restaurants? Are you a meat packer that caters to cafeterias and institutions? Then this article is for you. The Situation Many of you in the food chain sell into the commercial food service market. Historically speaking, that was […]
Author Archives: David McKay
How to Avoid The High Cost of IoT Network Outages
IoT network outage?! C’mon, man! So you’ve deployed your first (or second) IoT system. Maybe it gives you production performance, OEE or maintenance alerts. Way cool! You’ve harnessed the power of device to cloud information, and you are on the road to Malibu, Ferrari’s and sunglasses. Data loss? What do you mean, data loss?! […]
Putting Stuff in Boxes. Better.
3 Ways to Improve Packaging Line Performance (Drastically!) Let’s cut through the crap, Mr. Production Guy (or Gal). You know how to make your core product like no one else in the world. However… when it comes to putting that product in boxes, you’d just as soon blow up the packaging line and hire it […]
The Day OEE Destroyed the Plant!
Introducing – The Adventures of Joe Production Welcome! This is our first comic for Joe Production, an ongoing story about the misadventures and adventures of a Production Manager. Sounds dry, but we’ll do our best to inject some humor, while still trying to show real life issues and solutions for Joe. Sometimes a picture is […]
What is OEE? (Plus 5 Reasons OEE is an Epic Fail)
What is OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness)? OEE is, by definition, an abstract manufacturing metric. To oversimplify, OEE takes quality, availability and speed and mashes them all together to give you a number that represents performance. The exact definition is OEE (%) = Availability rate × Performance rate × Quality rate. Each factor breaks down like […]