There might come a time when your refrigerator tells your favorite ice cream manufacturer’s Rexroth equipment that you’ve bought a different flavor for the last few weeks and probably won’t be returning to your old favorite. In an article by Thomas Leyrer at Texas Instruments, he talks about smart factories that use Ethernet to send data across the manufacturing process to make for more intelligent decisions. Right now, he says, factories spend a week changing over to meet new data from consumer supply demand and Ethernet can help change that.
Decisions now can be made in a split second but, when it comes to the factory floor, they can’t be acted on immediately. That might be a good thing — some of those split-second decisions could be bad ideas. Your fridge might not really be the best decision maker. To put it another way, some 93% of all new products fail, and that’s happening now when it takes months to get products to market. More agile manufacturing could not only respond more quickly to consumer demand and allow faster iterations of product, it could also allow machinery to help the humans jump to the wrong conclusions.
It’s still many years off before freezers can talk to your Rexroth equipment. Until then, your Indramat servo motors need some old fashioned tender loving care and we can help. If you want your servos to stick around to see those big and exciting changes on the horizon, be sure to call us when things break and need repairs. Our repairs are done by the Rexroth factory so everything is just as it should be, even if demand is changing at the speed of social media.