Imagine an industrial facility with dozens of video cameras that continually record and store video of plant operations … for weeks, if not months. If the cameras are strategically placed, they will capture a visual record of nearly everything that happens in the facility. When […]
A New World of High Resolution Cameras We see footage from convenience store security cameras … usually in a police report or plea for citizen help … and the videos are colorless, grainy and lack detail to see the action clearly. It’s hard to imagine […]
Typical manufacturing and business operations involve a huge range of independent activities. One of the key differences between the various activities is the way in which they unfold over time … their speed and timing. Sad to say, our traditional operations management tools do a […]
In previous blog articles, I advocated using video monitoring technology in standard production operations. In writing these notes, I often wondered why this hasn’t happened already? The opportunity and benefits seem obvious and the costs are reasonable. I never found a definitive answer, but I […]
Factories need time machines! It would be really cool if a quality manager could go back in time and watch how (ultimately) defective units were made … their actual journey through production. It might help the maintenance engineer to watch a (later broken) machine as it started […]
As previous posts have argued, I believe that manufacturing and logistics operations are grossly under-utilizing video technology in their operations. I believe there are many easy wins if you apply standard video surveillance technology to manufacturing and logistics processes. However, as I watch the growing […]
For 20+ years I have heard objections to the use of video surveillance technology to routinely view and record factory (and warehouse) operations. Setting aside the fact that every facility routinely records security video, it is common to hear that “cameras are not allowed” or […]
A new concept in manufacturing is the prospect of “Industry 4.0”. It’s a factory where the new technologies (automation, digital communication, Internet of Things, cloud, etc) are integrated into a complete production system. The following YouTube video from Siemens makes it seem pretty real. What […]
At the end of the Hartybake production process there is an automatic bagger. Waffles are placed on a conveyor with small moving pegs to control spacing. Workers transfer the waffles that exit from the oven and insert them in the conveyor. The naturally irregular shape of these exotic […]
In a previous post, I showed a way to extract detailed operational data from a video clip of human-paced operations. As I did the tagging, I saw some situations where the operator deviated from the normal pattern. They happened when the workers who were passing waffles […]
In a previous post, I described a novel way to use video to capture visual evidence of process variation and make it far more evident to potential stakeholders. The technique used the Dartfish Analyzer video blending feature from the Dartfish video analysis software. The resulting […]
A lot of process variation occurs over extended periods of time. You can see that something may be happening, but the quantity and nature of the variation is not obvious. The following clip (from our friends at Hartybake) shows a conveyor system that is carrying balls […]
