John Downey

In regulated industries, CAPA (Corrective and Preventative Action) is a core component of your Quality Management System (QMS). Your CAPA quality process is essential for regulatory compliance reasons, but CAPA is also about improving product safety, operational safety in your plant, productivity, OEE, cost-base, and more – the list goes on. CAPA aims to identify …

How Digital Transformation Drives Significant CAPA Quality Process Efficiency Savings Read More »

Risks can enter an automation project at just about any stage. Those risks can result in serious consequences from budget and schedule overruns to unplanned downtime, disrupted supply chains, and more. Therefore, it’s important to de-risk your automation project at every possible stage. This ensures errors are reduced to a minimum, as well as ensuring the project …

8 Essential Elements For De-Risking An Automation Project Read More »

Advances in Smart Manufacturing technologies are changing the manufacturing sector forever. However, those technologies don’t change your core priorities and goals. New technologies or not, you still need to deliver high-quality products that your customers need and want, plus you must maximise competitiveness, productivity, and profitability. Marrying up a transition to Smart Manufacturing with your …

The Business Case for Smart Manufacturing Read More »

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” That’s a quote from Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company. It’s a famous quote, but what does it have to do with flexible manufacturing and mass customisation? Does it have any relevance in the …

How Industry 4.0 Supports Flexibility and Mass Customisation Read More »

Understanding what is happening now on your production line, and predicting what will happen in the future, is essential for maximising OEE, optimising productivity, and improving business profitability. You can achieve all these things with digital twin technologies. Digital twin technology is one of the most important Industry 4.0 technologies currently available. Digital twins give …

What is Digital Twin Technology and How It Benefits Manufacturing in the Industry 4.0 Era? Read More »

The manufacturing / ramp strategies in use on your production lines are crucial to the success of your business. Specifically, they enable you to profitably produce the required volume of products and, in most cases, leave room for growth in the future. Smart factory solutions allow you to take this a stage further by adding …

11 Manufacturing / Ramp Strategies that Smart Factory Solutions Facilitate Read More »

Expanding manufacturing capacity is essential to meet growing customer demand, but it also presents your business with an opportunity to take further steps towards becoming a Smart Factory. You can even go further than this – implementing an SL Controls Smart Factory solution when expanding manufacturing capacity can improve your overall business and make the …

Expanding Manufacturing Capacity – the Ideal Time to Implement Factory Automation Solutions Read More »

The smart factory and digital manufacturing technologies are the future of manufacturing. That said, change in business carries risks, particularly when those changes involve creating fundamentally different business and manufacturing processes. Smart factory technologies are not immune to such risks. One of the clearest examples of how the smart factory can go wrong comes from …

Too Much Too Soon – Avoiding Factory Automation & Smart Factory Implementation Risks Read More »