By Pat Dixon, PE, PMP
President of DPAS, (DPAS-INC.com)
Last year in the United States there were approximately 140 mill or converting plant closures or curtailments resulting in the loss of approximately 20,000 jobs. Nobody likes this, but when the health of the business is at stake these repulsive decisions need to be made.
In Industry 3.0, these decisions are made by reports that may be issued quarterly or monthly. The reports tell the corporate office how the overall business is doing and provides some information about your facilities. If you have multiple production facilities, you might know the operational efficiency at these facilities. You might also know about safety issues, depreciated capital, non-deferable investments to keep to facility running, new local regulatory compliance requirements, and labor relations. All of these and more are ways to compare your mills. When your enterprise is in trouble and costs need to be cut, you may have to use these reports to determine which mills to sell or close.
Industry 4.0 provides a better way.
Imagine you did not rely on quarterly or monthly reports. Imagine all the pertinent key performance indicators (KPI) for each of your mills are available in realtime. Each mill can see their KPIs and all others, providing incentive to keep them from sinking to the bottom. Before times get tough, this realtime information could predict where you are heading and point to the cause. If you identify the mill that is dragging you down, realtime information gives you options to deal with it before it becomes too late and results in closure.
Perhaps there is no way to automatically respond to labor relations issues and government regulations, but there are concerns that are under your control that can keep mills and employees productive with timely actions. The unfortunate actions of shedding mills and employees are not fun. In Industry 4.0, the better way may be to keep the mill running and jobs saved.
