Shark Tank-inspired manifesto for manufacturing CEOs and CFOs — “Show me the money!”

Connecting Manufacturing Conference, ORLANDO, USA: David McPhail and Dave Edstrom are on a network connectivity mission on behalf of manufacturing CEOs and CFOs.

Their company, Memex Automation Inc., is an award-winning global leader of Machine to Machine (M2M) manufacturing productivity solutions, but they're not content to transform machine-level productivity. At a talk they're giving tomorrow at the MC2 2014 MTConnect: Connecting Manufacturing Conference, the executives are laying out their vision to tie income statements real-time to what is happening on the shop floor - something they call "Financial OEE".

"Overall Equipment Effectiveness, or OEE, is the measurement of plant-wide capacity utilization, and it's generally accepted today as the most important manufacturing metric. However, using the open, royalty-free MTConnect standard, manufacturing companies can generate OEE in real-time, enterprise-wide, machine by machine," said McPhail, Memex Automation's CEO.

"As useful as that is for shop-floor management engineers and continuous improvement coordinators, we're now saying that's not good enough. Manufacturing CEOs and CFOs deserve more. To use an analogy inspired by the popular business TV show Shark Tank, they have a right to stand up and say ‘Show me the money!'"

"CEOs and CFOs in every manufacturing company can and should demand industry solutions that go beyond shop-floor monitoring systems to drive real-time updates to their income statements," emphasized McPhail.

"The holy grail of manufacturing excellence comes from understanding how manufacturers can move from an OEE utilization dashboard to solutions that produce real-time costing and financial data so they can understand at any given second what their plants are producing in dollars and cents versus percentage efficiency metrics."