--- title: "Want More Visibility into What’s Happening on the Production Floor?" date: 2024-11-22 15:56:21 description: "Many CNC manufacturers see the potential of machine monitoring, but don't know how to choose the right software provider." keywords: "the right software provider" categories: [The Datanomix Blog] tags: [Machine Monitoring, Manufacturing Technology, Next-Gen, No Operator Input, Production Monitoring, Real-Time Production Data] --- ## Choose the Right Software Provider. From the beginning, manufacturers have manually collected data using paper, clipboards, sticky notes, notebooks, and now tablets to track issues, part counts, cycle times, and other information. The need for data is undeniable, but manually inputting, collecting, and analyzing data wastes time and resources because the information is available on the CNC machine’s controller. A step in the right direction is to select a software provider and implement production monitoring, or machine monitoring, which is designed to tell you what’s happening on your machines. Still, we found that many of the providers were either: 1. Too simple to be helpful, only answering the question: “When am I running and not running?” 2. Too complicated to be sustainable because they still required a lot of operator input and data analysis. These systems recognized that customers wanted to know why a machine is down. Their solution was to have operators input the reasons, usually by choosing a reason code assigned to common issues. This method is problematic because the available codes don’t always reflect why a machine is down, and overburdened operators pick the first reason on the list to get back to running their machines. As discussed in our think piece, [The Fatal Flaws of First Generation Monitoring Systems](https://datanomix.io/2021/12/07/the-fatal-flaws-of-first-generation-monitoring-systems/), the insights manufacturers need don’t exist in on/off or reason code data. We’ve found that other systems show what manufacturers already knew: they change tools, machines get unhappy sometimes, chips need to be cleared, parts need to be measured, and team members go to the bathroom… ### We Made Something Better [Our “no operator input” philosophy](https://datanomix.io/2021/10/27/does-your-production-monitoring-require-operator-input/) is at the core of [our production monitoring platform](https://datanomix.io/production-monitoring/). We figure that if you are paying for software, it should be doing all the work, not your people. Datanomix collects, analyzes, and presents meaningful data so your team can see where to focus and allocate resources to improve. It’s a simple concept that wasn’t available until we came along. ### We Show Customers Where to Focus Our production monitoring software gathers, analyzes, benchmarks, and scores all the live raw data from CNC machine controllers to display real-time and historical insights across mobile devices, shopfloor TVs, and dashboards. We show everyone on the shop floor where to focus to meet production goals because you can’t win without visibility into how to [Make More](https://datanomix.io/data-powered-production/). ### Choose the Right Provider As facilities strive to be as efficient as possible to win more jobs and optimize profitability, they invest in machine monitoring. But with so many companies vying for your attention, how do you separate the signal from the noise and choose the right provider? The first question to ask yourself is, “Is this vendor’s approach giving me more clarity or more confusion?”…. and the only way to figure that out is to go through the sales process. We’ve outlined [our two-step approach to evaluating software here](https://datanomix.io/datanomix-vs-competitors/), but the right solution provider should: - **Install and onboard seamlessly**, with nearly instant access to your data. - **Automatically determine performance**—what job you are running, how the jobs are performing, and how you _should_ be performing, all with no effort or input required at all. - **Broadcast how you are performing to your entire team** and indicate where you need to focus to improve today’s performance. - **Automatically roll up your completed job runs into a simple post-mortem analysis** that shows how the job ran, how the run compares to your typical run, and which days were good or bad. - **Automatically assess your performance** over time on every job you run and show you which processes present the greatest opportunities for profit improvement. No matter which software provider you choose, you will be making a multi-year investment representing a very real amount of money that needs to [return profit to your business](https://datanomix.io/roi-calculator/). If you want real-time visibility, do your research and vet your options. [The good ones will prove it in a pilot](https://datanomix.io/request-a-pilot/). [GET COMPARING](https://datanomix.io/datanomix-vs-competitors/)