NOVEMBER 20248MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTS8IN MY OPINIONBy Andrea Rapetti, VP Smart Factory, Datwyler GroupMACHINE CONNECTIVITY: WHERE DOES EDGE COMPUTING FIT?Manufacturing companies are relying more and more on machines. It all started with the first Industrial Revolution and then it evolved through usage of electricity, the adoption of automation until the current fourth revolution dogma based on interconnectivity and intelligence: the cyber-physical systems.Machines remain the highest investment for manufacturing companies, transforming or assembling, for continuous or discrete processes, mass production or one-piece-flow. And the calling imperative is always to increase productivity. From an entrepreneurial perspective, there is nothing worse than underutilized machines; it is just like throwing the money in out-of-fashion clothes, or buying a vacation house in the wrong location.The point is that we do not know enough about our machines: we did not build them, in most of the cases, and after years of operating, we have learnt to set them up, tune them and let them run, until the next break down. And sometimes breakdowns are real nightmares, where after days of downtime, we discover that the 2 euros caused the break was not replaced during the last maintenance run, as everybody was claiming: that will never break. Andrea Rapetti
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