Ferry Manufacturing Snippets: April 29th - 5th May 2024

Here's the weekly digest of Ferry's manufacturing snippets!

Monday - 29th April

For those in manufacturing, there's been a noticeable gap in the usage of GenAI on the factory floor. This is despite the benefits:

• Natural language search for production-level insights (no code, no data analysis, no graphs to peak into)

• Accessible anywhere: on the web, on a mobile, on the go

• Speeds up reporting

• Automates routine analysis (today this happens daily - manually - before shifts start!)

Who's the culprit holding this back? Data siloes!

To leverage GenAI for information search + insights, you need the data in the first place.

Getting that out of a myriad of systems, in real-time, in formats that a LLM can subsume, with context that a LLM can enrich from ... is really difficult.

Watch this space

Tuesday - 30th April

Perpetual licenses v.s. subscription pricing in manufacturing

Unlike other industries, perpetual licenses are still quite common. And understandable if you view expenditure through a capex lens -> big investment today, outcomes seen over years. Works well for hardware and for capacity expansion.

Software though is a different kettle of fish. It requires consistent upkeep, feature enhancement and maintenance.

The danger of perpetual licenses in software is misaligned incentives. The incentive to get the job done quickly, charge a lot, and then wrap maintenance contracts with pricing that verges on the predatory.

We've seen examples where manufacturers are charged $10k just to add a column to a table...

With subscription pricing, the vendor has to earn the right to serve you. Therefore they have to invest in the product month on month, year on year.

It's a far better model for the market. And much cheaper.

Wednesday - 1st May

It's always a small handful of SKUs (i.e. products) which cause the most trouble on a production line.

We've found that usually 5 SKUs account for 30% - 40% of total downtime during production runs.

Find the top five.

Then break each SKU down by: downtime by unit produced x total volume

(to separate the effects)

There's always one which you're producing a lot of which generates substantially more downtime per unit.

Sometimes 5x more than your best performing ones!

Thursday - 2nd May

Peak under the hood when a manufacturing solution claims to be plug-and-play

Take out that magnifying glass and find that asterisk :

• "Requires Kepware so that we can consume OPC-UA"

• "You need to pay a service fee to connect to PLCs"

• "Format your data in our way please"

• "You need to buy our hardware"

• "We have about 20 pages of documentation first"

• "That functionality you really need? There's an add-on for that"

Seems to be more plug-and-play for the vendor than for the client!