Get smart: Your business success depends on it

It is difficult to take a complex function and make it easy. Yet in manufacturing, businesses must do so to stay alive. Initiatives and catch-phrases such as the Digital Factory, Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things, the Cloud, Big Data, and the Industrial Internet are all about the same premise, which is to network and automate manufacturing operations to make factories – whether small jobs shop or large OEMs –more efficient, profitable, and easy for the digital generation of employees to run. We're almost there, but we need to stay the course.

You might be pausing before you take the next steps in digitising your own operations, but don't give up just because it's challenging or inconvenient. It's necessary for the future of your company to remain competitive and for the viability of the manufacturing sector as a whole. Certain aspects of the digital factory movement have been evolving for decades, including CNC machine tools and controls; CAD/CAM; machining simulation; presetting; robotics and other material-handling devices; and enterprise, inventory, and material planning software.

Now is the time for everything to connect, communicate, crunch, capture, and cough up the results for better decision making and a higher level of efficiency. Open, Cloud-based platforms such as The Machining Cloud and NOVO™ from WIDIA digitally integrate accurate and complete tool data, rules, and application knowledge to help users rethink and shorten process planning and more. WIDIA is an example of an organisation that stayed the course: the initial concept for NOVO was sketched out years ago, and was officially launched at IMTS 2014. It has been painstaking to make vast tooling knowledge, myriad application data, and results "easy". Imagine the complex algorithms and decision trees involved. But we did it because we wanted to be part of the 21st century manufacturing evolution and help keep our customers competitive and profitable.

Bernie McConnell

We are faced with the same challenges you are and happen to be customers of our own products. We needed to develop NOVO for our own operations. We found that while it was of great benefit to new and less-experienced employees, even our most experienced machinists and engineers embraced NOVO for its ability to spec our newest tools and discovered new ways to apply certain tools that they may have otherwise dismissed. In the product R&D lab, we also made certain to develop families of tools with broad application ranges to ensure that tool selection is easy.

Was it a cinch to make products simple? No. The level of sophistication behind them is immense. There are many things that you are called upon to do now, too, perhaps difficult things, to make your operations more streamlined and to capture the treasured knowledge within your organisation. We've been dutifully warned by trade press editors and thought leaders about the 2.7 million industry employees who will reach retirement age in 10 years. Now is the time for you to document and digitise the knowledge your most highly skilled and experienced people possess that isn't being captured elsewhere, such as in a CAM program or the procedure section of your quality manual.

How and why do they make the decisions they do about a particular material, process, or workpiece? It may seem daunting, but if there's one thing we've learned in developing NOVO, it can be done. Take small steps – one process at a time, build that knowledge base of searchable data, and stay the course. Get Smart.

WIDIA