Keystone Resource
Machine data is only useful once it knows about the job
Why machine monitoring alone produces dashboards nobody acts on, and what changes when telemetry is joined to the job.
This is a first draft awaiting review by somebody who runs a factory. It is published as a working document rather than as advice.
Machine monitoring is usually sold on utilisation. A screen appears in the office, everybody looks at it for a fortnight, and then it becomes wallpaper.
The reason is not that the data is wrong. It is that a percentage with no context does not tell anybody what to do differently.
What changes with context
When a reading is joined to the works order and operation that were running, the questions become answerable in operational terms.
- A machine stopped for four hours — which order was on it, and is that order now late?
- This operation was quoted at ninety minutes and the machine says it ran for three hours. Is the routing wrong, or was that job unusual?
- A machine has stopped reporting while a job is booked to it. Is it broken, or is the collector down?
Protocols, briefly
MTConnect is an open standard for machine data, maintained by the MTConnect Institute, and is well supported on newer controls. Modbus is older, widely implemented and much simpler. FANUC controls are commonly read through FOCAS, which needs a library from the manufacturer.
What a given machine can report varies enormously, and age matters more than brand. Establishing what your controls actually expose is a job for the start of a project, not an assumption at the end of one.
One boundary worth insisting on
Collection should be read-only, structurally. A system that can write to a machine controller is a different class of risk and belongs to a different kind of software with a different safety case. Ask any vendor whether the boundary is enforced in the code or only in the documentation.
What this does not cover
What your machines can report depends on their controls and their age. Nothing here should be taken as a statement about your specific equipment.
Next step
Show us how your factory runs
A walkthrough starts with your orders, your production flow and your material problems. We follow one of your jobs through the system rather than presenting a feature list.