Managers still need to manage teams and machines, but they might be in a separate facility or even another city. One of the biggest challenges for factories today is keeping track of operations remotely. Essentially, manufacturers in certain sectors are being asked to triple or quadruple output with half the staff.
#Lights out manufacturing software
Factories aren’t just back to operation “they’re stretched to the limit,” says Saar Yoskovitz, chief executive officer of Augury, a producer of hardware and A.I-driven software for monitoring machine health and performance. That’s already happening in critical areas like food and beverage.
![lights out manufacturing lights out manufacturing](https://i0.wp.com/enterpriseiotinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/lights-out-manu.jpg)
As the pandemic subsides, consumer demand is likely to surge. So what’s the real end game for automation in the factory? In the short run, expect to see a lot more of it. But neither are they destined for the metaphorical scrap heap, in all but the simplest manufacturing environments. To be sure, the human role is changing people aren’t needed to push buttons or validate the quality of widgets speeding along a production line. Their judgment remains critical, even in the age of artificial “intelligence” - at least until machines have grown a lot smarter than they are today. Simply put, humans are in key ways indispensable. That’s likely to happen to an increasingly greater degree, but there’s a widely voiced counterargument to the push for all-robot factories. What better way to address the problem than to replace humans with disease-free machines? In the months (and possibly years) ahead, manufacturers will have to take into account the need for social distancing, in environments that have long necessitated close contact. Yet manufacturing isn’t immune to the coronavirus pandemic, which has touched every aspect of business and the supply chain. (Or the need for illumination to guide human eyes and hands hence the term.) But those kind of facilities remain relative rare today, confined to products that are highly uniform and unchanging in nature. In some instances, the trend has culminated in the creation of “lights-out” warehouses and factories, where there’s not a person to be seen among the racks and conveyors. Tedious, repetitive tasks - the kind that have dominated factories since Henry Ford began churning out Model Ts in the early 20 th century - are a natural for machines, which never get bored or (theoretically) make mistakes. Without question, manufacturers in recent few decades have been inching steadily toward automation, resulting in fewer and fewer warm bodies on the production line. Does the vision of a “new normal” on the factory floor exclude the presence of people at all?