Reduce your Manufacturing Costs with a Hyperflexible Manufacturing 4.0 Platform

Many skeptics still regard digitization as a job killer. In reality, however, digitization offers a multitude of opportunities and potentials:

• higher productivity
• lower costs
• greater competitiveness
• location security

Those who forego digitization sacrifice returns. After all, with networked systems and real-time transparency from the shop floor (production) to the top floor (controlling), cash money can be saved – be it through lower downtimes or less use of resources. In short: by reducing unit costs.

The path to a transparent and data-driven factory often looks complicated – MDE, M2M, MES, BDE, ERP, KI, Edge, Cloud. The most effective way through the digital jungle: an IT platform that covers (almost) everything. Because every digital transformation in production requires concrete answers to central questions:

• How can the efficiency be increased and the costs reduced?
• How do I empower my employees?
• How do I digitally connect different machine controls?
• How do I network shop and top floor?
• How can I use real-time data from production across departments for controlling?

FORCAM’s IT platform for the industrial Internet of Things offers a holistic solution. With the FORCAM FORCE™ platform solution, companies can easily and quickly network their heterogeneous machine parks using plug-ins and thus obtain a unique real-time production data model – the “digital twin” for production. This recorded data is available in real time to Controlling and all other departments. This provides those responsible with meaningful plant key figures, which form the basis for measures and optimizations. At the macro level, this means that targeted analyses of costs are possible at the product level. By minimizing manual recording and reporting efforts, costs are also reduced.

At the macro level, on the other hand, differences and deviations between production and controlling in terms of quantities and times are eliminated – value streams between ERP and MES are harmonized. The result: transparency at all levels.

The same applies to the introduction of a production data acquisition system (PDA). Many of the PDA systems available on the market today involve high risks with regard to future security and flexibility, since this often ends in manufacturer dependency and obsolete technology is used. Although some of these systems still do justice to the status quo, in a few years’ time they will already be at the end of your own product life cycle, as you can no longer keep pace with the rapid pace of technological development. A further risk is the lack of interoperability with other systems, which means that many companies can quickly achieve success at the beginning, but after a while they realize that they are going full throttle into a dead end.