What is your equipment telling you?

As Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing marks its 10th anniversary, the staff is looking back on the events and issues that shaped our coverage over our first decade. Read more of our 10 Trends for 10 Years here.

By Karen Hanna

From molding pressure to the number of turns your grinding wheel has made, if you quantify it, you probably can track it with today’s monitoring technologies — often in real time. 

Big data has come to plastics in a big way.  

At NPE2024, processing machine makers exhibited huge displays right alongside their equipment on screens that would have dwarfed anything from a decade ago. 

Processing has become a numbers game.  

“But data, in and of itself, is not the asset,” Kate Brown, senior technology consulting manager, business intelligence and analytics for Wipfli, said in a podcast for Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing. “It's what you do with the data that makes it an asset for your business.” 

By analyzing data at the plant — or even across plants, using systems such ABB’s OptiFact, which can leverage information from multiple users’ experiences — manufacturers can get a better handle on their processes.  

That can mean better recipe management, smarter job scheduling or more strategically timed maintentance of components, such as pumps, feedscrews and screw tips. 

Eric Haddad, plant manager at Pittsfield Plastics Engineering LLC, summed up the advantages the Pittsfield, Mass., molding shop has seen since implementing an ERP system to handle its data this way:  

"It leaves time for improvements and thinking about what we’re doing and paying attention to what we’re doing and gives people a sense of understanding, they’re not just in this chaos where there’s just stuff piled into a work center and they’re thrown in there to do whatever they have to do to get it done... It’s much more organized."