Another significant challenge for manufacturing organizations is reducing the complexity and manual intervention required to create useful analytics. These organizations must gather data from multiple siloed sources, standardize it, and then load it into a data platform with the proper data governance and quality controls. Companies can then use this intelligence to automate the data pipeline, train advanced AI models, and make informed decisions. But manufacturing staff don’t always have the technical expertise to operate these systems or to interpret the often voluminous output.
A new form of this process of data collection and analysis is called augmented analytics, which eliminates the need for extensive experience, knowledge, or technical skills by automatically providing users with relevant insights. Augmented analytics utilizes Natural Language Query (NLQ) technology, which provides self-service business intelligence based on natural language search. Generating custom reports and personalized dashboards becomes as easy as searching with voice commands. This provides assembly line engineers and technicians with access to critical insights without specialized training.
Of course, manufacturing companies need ways to make their data insights usable. One particularly fruitful area here is applicable in predictive fault prevention on the manufacturing line. Sensors placed along the production line can monitor various important metrics, such as production speed. The sensors can combine data from multiple sources to monitor the health and performance of each machine along the manufacturing process.
Measuring temperature, voltage, power consumption, and production speed can help manufacturers track and pinpoint specific machine faults. Once the measurements and data patterns exceed certain thresholds, maintenance teams can be alerted to check machines for potential faults. This enables them to repair or replace parts that might cause unexpected downtime on the entire production line.
Manufacturing organizations are increasingly looking for better ways to manage and analyze data in diverse structural formats. Traditionally, manufacturing companies would use schema-based data systems. These systems gather data that are in multiple formats, but the data then requires preprocessing before it is available for analytics. This requirement prevents organizations from scaling their data platforms and integrating more data sources.
Many manufacturing organizations are adopting data lake technologies to integrate information from multiple sources to address data incompatibility. A data lake is a central repository that allows companies to store both structured and unstructured data and to do so at any scale. Data lakes significantly reduce the time needed to process and analyze data, allowing organizations to react more quickly to market and operations changes. Data lakes also enable manufacturing companies to scale their data platforms more effectively.
Implementing data lake technologies also allows manufacturing companies to leverage machine learning and AI capabilities better. This can lead to improvements in predictive maintenance, quality control, and demand forecasting. As a result, manufacturing organizations can optimize their operations, minimize downtime, and ultimately become more competitive.
Manufacturing organizations increasingly seek better ways to manage and analyze diverse data formats to perform and benefit from advanced analytics. Data lake technologies, in particular, will likely play a significant role in enabling these organizations to remain agile and competitive in an ever-changing global market.
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