Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering for Better Equipment
I have spent a lot of my career around manufacturing equipment. I have worked in Lean, engineering, maintenance, process improvement, and reliability. Of course, we have to repair equipment, and we need good preventive maintenance. But I think there is another question we should be asking. How can I make this machine better? For many years, most of my improvement work was focused on traditional Lean manufacturing. Around 2016, I became much more involved in maintenance and manufacturing engineering. I started experimenting with sensors, cameras, equipment data, monitoring systems, and other technologies. I began to see how much opportunity there was when I combined engineering with maintenance. I remember working with heavy industrial equipment where we had machines taking some pretty significant impacts during production. The frustrating part was that maintenance didn't always know an impact had occurred. The machine might continue running and then fail hours or even days late...