As production line machinery becomes more advanced, whether it is an industrial 3D printer in a plastic parts manufacturing plant or a consumable goods facility producing multiple lines of packaged food, multi-purpose lines will become more abundant. In order to support a multi-purpose line it will require several different recipes for each product. These recipes include different material inputs, equipment, heating components, and many other variables.

Challenge
With a multi-purpose production line requiring frequent recipe changes, sometimes changing several times a day, managing it manually (as many do today) can lead to costly human errors – damage to machinery or tainted consumable batches. Therefore plants must deploy technology that will allow operators to have better visibility to potential issues and a more automated recipe processes

IoT
Using Augmate Connect, a multi-purpose production line operator can manage the general health of each machine on the line using real-time alerts. Predictive analytics can be applied to quickly determine any negative correlation with any given machine combination or recipe. Perhaps the most significant benefit to an operator will be the ability to create policies for every recipe. Recipe inputs can be fed into a policy and distributed down to all of the connected machines on the line, hence eliminating or greatly reducing human error.