Podcast: Why data collection is worth the time, effort and expense

Mike Payne loves data and metrics. If he can pull information from a machine, he's doing it.

The president and owner of Broken Bow, Oklahoma-based Hill Manufacturing & Fabrication talked with IndustryWeek’s and Smart Industry’s Dennis Scimeca about why he collects all that data, what he does with it and why.

And as he tells this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, despite all this technology, succeeding in manufacturing is still all about relationships and performance, not the tech alone.

Podcast: Additive succeeds when 'no one cares the part they're holding is 3D printed'

Payne noted that before data collection, managers would assign tasks to machinists with a time estimate. And, wouldn't you know it, that's how long it turned out they needed to make each part. Was the machine in use that entire time? How much of that time was set-up vs. production? Could the company have cut those time allotments by 20% without harming quality? Without data collection to monitor what was really happening, nobody knew.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

DS: As I mentioned, Mike is not just a podcast host; he has networking new plants down to a science, which is why I want to speak to him about the how—and, more importantly, the why—of capturing data. So, Mike, when we first met, you were talking to me about, I believe, the very first plant that you purchased, in 2018, and you were saying how you didn't have any data capture at that plant when you first started.

See also: Executives advocate for reshaping of workforce following job cuts from AI

And when you first turned on machine monitoring—when you got the plant wired up—you said you were running 30% spindle utilization. And when they began capturing and analyzing data, that changed to the 50% to 60% range. Now, to what do you attribute—that’s like double—to what do you attribute that change just by looking at data?

MP: Yeah, I think—I mean, everybody's heard their entire careers: what's measured matters, right? And when we weren't tracking it, it didn’t matter. When we talk about not having data capture on the front end, I mean, I guess we did have data capture; it just was garbage in, garbage out, right? It was a paper-based system where we’d give an operator at the machine, like, “Here's this job you're running. It should take eight minutes a part.”

See also: What manufacturers risk when they try to patch everything

And remarkably, how long do you think it took? Eight minutes a part, right? Because they just filled in the blanks: “Well, I was here eight hours and I got 64 parts,” or whatever. It might have taken them eight and a half; it might have taken them seven, but there was no tie to that data. It was just handwritten data.