The More You Know
With good information, business owners can react to issues on their shop floors in an informed and timely manner
Article written by Abbe Miller, originally published March 31, 2023 in Shop Floor Lasers
As the software business unit leader at Cincinnati Inc. (CI), Bryant Downey has a lot of good advice to share, but more than anything else, he says it all boils down to one thing: “If you don’t have good information, you can’t make good decisions.”
But what constitutes good information? Could it come from a handwritten log where operators jot down how many parts they made each shift? Sure, but only as long as no one transposes a few numbers or forgets to enter their data at the end of the day.
Could it come in the form of insight from Bob, the guy who’s been the shop floor supervisor for 25 years and knows which machines cause the most headaches, which operators work the hardest and which ones have trouble getting started on a Monday morning? Definitely, but Bob is going to eventually retire.
On top of human error and the god-given right to retire at some point, these forms of gathering “good information” don’t happen in real time. To make a good business decision, it needs to be well-informed, but it also needs to be timely.
So how do businesses that have long relied on handwritten documentation make the shift to real-time, accurate reporting? Well, according to Downey, it might be as easy as plugging a laser cutting machine or press brake into the internet.
Secure connections
Downey is referring to CI’s CIberDash reporting software, which collects machine data in real-time, including the machine’s uptime, downtime, idle time and setup time; which operator is at the machine; the program and part currently in production; and part counts and scrap counts. If a fabricator’s Cincinnati equipment features PC-based controls, it can connect to the CIberDash platform.
In terms of “connecting” to the platform, there are three points of note: first, it doesn’t require an IT whiz kid to set it up. Second, the connection is incredibly secure, and third, it was developed to be easy to use regardless of the size of the business or the experience it has working with Software as a Server (SaaS) systems.
“It’s a web-based solution, so there’s no software to install,” Downey says. “As long as the customer has an internet connection with a browser, they can use CIberDash. They can use it on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone – anything that has a browser. There’s no need for an IT person to put software on computers or install a server or anything like that. The biggest thing to accomplish is connecting the machines to the internet.”
These days, almost every business has a decent internet connection, so running a cable to a machine is all it takes. And typically, machines are already connected based on operators’ need to access shared file storage systems for programs and drawings.
Once the internet connection is established, CI’s tech department remotely installs the tool that feeds machine data to the CIberDash system, which, as a SaaS, is hosted on the cloud. From there, CI provides the customer with a login to the CIberDash portal where they get access to their equipment and their data.
In terms of cyber security, CIberDash is hosted in Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, meaning customers can rely on the hundreds of staff employed by Microsoft that have devoted their careers to cyber security. Downey says that typically customers choose to connect their machines to a dedicated manufacturing network, or, for bigger companies, a network dedicated exclusively for production equipment.
“If a customer has heightened security concerns, we can provide a cellular modem capability that is still providing data to CIberDash in real-time, but that’s not connected to their network infrastructure,” he says.
During R&D, CI understood the wide range of customers that could potentially use CIberDash – large customers that would need to connect to 30 machines or more and smaller customers that might only need to connect to a few machines.
“A production OEM is typically making the same part on the same machine all day every day, while a job shop is making different parts every hour of the day that they might never make again,” he explains. “Those two customers don’t function the same way, so we needed to provide a tool that could work for customers on both ends of the spectrum.”
