Jim Anderton: In the factory environment, metrology is very important. But we tend to think of metrology in terms of dimensional units of measurement for some parameter; we think height, weight, or length, for example. However, factory metrology really has a much broader meaning. Really it's about profitability, machine utilization and capacity. I’m with Taylor Dawson, sales engineer for Hexagon. Taylor, I understand we're looking at a software-based solution here that lets us monitor what's going on in a factory?
Taylor Dawson: That's absolutely correct! HxGN Smart Quality is a management tool that can be used anywhere, like you said, it's a URL. What you can do here is either monitor specific areas of a factory, or multiple factories from the national or global standpoint. So, right here we have our factory summary dashboard. This lists, for Hexagon at least, nationwide all of the factories across there. You can click into one factory and then you can see the productivity of this factory. This is what we call our productivity dashboard. You have a nice summary of machine utilization hours, a dollar sign attached to that, and then broken down by product and by machine, what's happening live right now. You can also see on the right side a historical data of what was happening with the machine at each time. So, if it was being used for profit, if it was down for maintenance, or if it had crashed for an unknown circumstance. The next tab that we have here is our ‘pulse’ tab. Pulse is an environmental sensor for our products. You can monitor live over 12 hours, a day, or a week-long time what's happening with the Machine. Is it too humid in the environment? Is the temperature fluctuating too much? Is there a construction zone that's vibrating and causing a lot of noise in the world around it? So, here we are able to monitor all of this and use this with the dashboard to kind of compare and contrast where our shortcomings are and where our strengths are. That way, it gives the user of Smart Quality an overarching idea of what's happening and that way they can make decisions very quickly without having to go to multiple people.
JA: Can I generate reports with this?
TD: Yes, you can generate reports. The reports are actually generated through the machines and sent up here through the cloud. Everything's accessible online.
JA: Would you use this tool in the front office to measure operations within one factory, it could use this to measure operations or remote factories or in the world?
TD: That's a great question. This can be used on a small ‘mom-and-pop’ scale, to a global scale. It's really tailored to the customer. It's a very customer-driven solution that, like you mentioned earlier, is more of a management tool to help them succeed.
JA: Manufacturing resource management at a high level, says Taylor Dawson at Hexagon.