All industries grouped under Mill Products (like building materials, metals, forest products, paper, packaging, furniture, textile, and many more) have some characteristics in common:
- They need expensive assets to run their business.
- Their environment can be described as commodity market - many vendors are able to offer the same product thus price erosion is often seen.
With high amounts of capital employed at those assets they want to make sure they get the highest possible return on that money. And that translates to running an asset properly and it translates to producing profitable products as much as possible. Minimizing unplanned downtime of assets is a key measure to reach this goal - and one method of choice is infamous
predictive maintenance everyone talks about in these days.
While those companies have collected and analyzed sensor data for many years, recent technology innovations allow for more data to be processed in much shorter time - plus more devices get integrated. And here is the news: This technology has arrived already at production facilities of the first Mill Products companies! I was very excited to see that Mohawk will speak about using Predictive Maintenance! If you can spare the time have a look at
this session at Sapphire Now / ASUG conference:
Mohawk, the world's leading flooring manufacturer, uses SAP HANA and predictive analytics in the \"Predictive Maintenance\" program to increase product quality by improving its manufacturing process parameters, including many millions of sensor data readings
(Session ID BI747, scheduled for May 5th, 2015, 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. EST) at Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, Florida
