Mike Payne, president and owner of Hill Manufacturing & Fabrication love data and metrics. If he can pull information from a machine, he's doing it. Mike talked with IndustryWeek's Dennis Scimeca about why he collects all of that data, what he does with it and why, despite all of this technology, succeeding in manufacturing is still all about relationships and performance, not technology.
The big message? Just start tracking things.
"What's measured matters. So, and when we weren't tracking it, didn't matter," Payne says of his operations in 2018. "We would give an operator at the machine, 'Here's this job you're running, it should take eight minutes a part. Well, remarkably, how long do you think it took? Eight minutes a part.... It might have taken them eight-and-a-half, it might have taken them seven. But, there was no tie to that data."
Other insights include what technologies have the biggest impact, what manufacturers need to do to start collecting data and how it's probably easier now than it's ever been (Payne talks about how WiFi and other off-the-shelf systems mean the infrastructure burden is nothing like it was a few years ago.)
