What I've found so far is many of the toolmakers seem way behind the times on this kind of data collection. I come from a data warehousing background so it baffles me that the tooling software isn't designed from day one to collect production data, especially as it is not easy to tack on as an afterthought.
I'd love to be able to do a log dump at the end of each day and collect information such as part number and quantity made, amount of material run through the machine, etc. As it stands we're going to have to kluge together a tracking system that still uses and awful lot of human input, which is very prone to mistakes. |