We get a call several times a week of a customer that wants to track every single piece of equipment on the manufacturing line, and they want to know every time it went down. Sure, we can do that, but who’s got the time to go through those thousand pages of downtime events. So what we recommend is you identify what we call the heartbeat of the line.
So here’s kind of an experiment to think about why you would even want to do that. So you’ve got pudding cups that are being filled. You have a filler, you have a conveyor and packaging machine for this example. Let’s say the conveyor goes down 20 times but the filler just keeps on filling packaging cups or pudding cups. Let’s say the packaging machine, however goes down twice and each time takes down the entire line. When that happens you’re not making money.
So where do you put your focus? Do you care about the conveyer going down 20 times? Or do you want to know when your packaging machine goes down twice and takes everything with it?