The New MES: Backbone of Industry 4.0

whitePaper | November 17, 2022

Changing customer expectations, coupled with pandemic, natural disaster, and geo-political impacted supply chain delays, renewed the spotlight on business agility and digital maturity in manufacturing. Just as customers demanded more transparency into the production process, the world saw shortages of raw materials and parts, pushing droves of manufacturers to reevaluate the way they do business. For many, the answer was smart manufacturing—achieved through cloud-based technologies that simplify digital transformation.

whitePaper | October 11, 2022

Identifying problems before they cause equipment failure and costly, unplanned downtime is the purpose of proactive and predictive maintenance programs. And one of the most reliable ways of catching problems before they become failures is to detect when a piece of equipment is beginning to operate outside of its normal parameters – especially if it is beginning to run too hot or too cold. Variations from normal heating are often the first signs of impending equipment failure, so frequent thermal inspections of critical equipment such as motors, belts, and drives not only helps extend the life of these assets, but keep your entire operation up and running normally

whitePaper | June 12, 2022

Automation has been a driving force behind greater productivity and efficiency in manufacturing companies since the 1980s. In the 2020s, a new generation of applications will enable even more production companies to benefit from the potential of automated processes. Advances in sensor technology and networking enable increasingly complex tasks to be performed reliably and safely by robots. Thanks to high-performance sensor technology, they can automatically react to many changing circumstances. Connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), the robots automatically provide information about progress and incidents. Via a remote connection, the IoT technology can be provided with new instructions, monitored, and remotely operated if necessary.

whitePaper | October 3, 2022

If yours is like most businesses today, you run a tight ship. When you see problems on your production line, you do not wait to solve them, and the result is a lean operation that does not let issues linger or snowball into larger problems. But it is impossible to fix what you cannot see or track. While Industry 4.0 is often a buzzword, Watlow® is already providing solutions that are helping manufacturers proactively forecast future issues and reduce costs. Given that the average cost of an hour of downtime in manufacturing was $532,000 in 2021, there is so much opportunity for businesses to save money with Industry 4.0.

whitePaper | June 2, 2022

For decades, energy-intensive commodity businesses for paper and packaging aimed for better process control, leading to higher product quality with less energy consumption. This would help to both reduce costs and maintain a healthier environment. A plethora of concepts and devices were invented to control the production and verify or predict the product quality. This approach had some measure of success, but it had its limits.

whitePaper | August 1, 2020

Today’s manufacturers are under pressure to be more flexible, reduce downtime and costs and increase efficiencies. In addition to making new investments in production and technology, data-driven manufacturing companies are responding to these pressures by leveraging the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), the industrial internet of things, (IIoT), cloud computing technologies and innovations in smart measurement and quality data management systems—resulting in greater visibility into their operations. Read our whitepaper, “Smart Measuring Systems for the Smart Factory,” to learn how Mitutoyo is helping advance factory intelligence.