IGear, a smart manufacturing and supply chain solutions provider, has teamed up with industrial machinery company Komatsu America Industries and robotics systems integrator Genesis Systems Group, to improve its SQUEAKS mobile-first industrial messaging app.
The app is designed to facilitate quicker, better decision-making, and closed-loop collaboration, with machines as part of the conversation. It integrates messaging across machines and personnel; and it enables algorithms, rules and analysis to be applied across multiple data environments to formulate insights and prescriptive actions. This allows front-line workers and management to be updated on events driven by both simple conditional alerts, and complex event triggers. SQUEAKS makes it possible for workers to respond quickly to understand an event’s root cause and validate ownership and closure, with timestamps.
“We believe the true power of IIoT messaging comes from a combination of generating insightful data from industrial equipment, and its ability to share this data among selected individuals, via mobile technology, to ensure clarity, ownership, accountability, and interaction,” said Don Korfhage, president and CEO, IGear.
When people and machines communicate well, manufacturers benefit. Some of those benefits include improved uptime and overall equipment effectiveness, resulting in less scrap and rework, lower operating costs (personnel, material management and flow, floor space utilization), continuous improvement and heightened workforce engagement.
“The Industrial Internet of Things has the potential to usher in a new wave of innovation and reinvention of manufacturing as we know it,” said Korfhage. “But it’s also creating a data explosion, with some 20 billion connected devices expected by 2020.”
According to the International Federation of Robotics, there were about 1.6 million operational industrial robots worldwide at the end of 2015. Getting machines and robots to be “team players” and communicate effectively with their human manufacturing floor stewards is of the utmost importance as the demand for industrial robots has accelerated considerably due to the ongoing trend toward automation and the continued innovative technical improvements in industrial robots.