Monitoring is the means of watching and controlling the activities of a supply chain, whether this relates to staff on the factory floor or products in the process of delivery dispatch. It takes place via records, data input and often the observations of human employees.

By monitoring industrial supply chains effectively, enterprises are able to review past and present performance levels via KPIs, create benchmarks and ascertain how to cater for levels of demand and improve internal processes.

Carolina Precision cuts down maintenance issues

Carolina Precision is a manufacturer of small, tuned parts and any maintenance issues with machinery are costly. While in the past an employee was dedicated to watching machines and manually compiling data on production, this process was prone to error and required at least two hours of labor per day.

The company invested in IoT to streamline the process and reduce human error. Machine monitoring software was installed on equipment, which not only sent alerts when failures occurred or were about to disrupt manufacturing processes, but also monitored the performance levels of shift workers.

Carolina Precision says the solution has increased the operating hours of each machine by 668 hours per year, which in turn increased capacity by $1.5 million in 2016. ROI was achieved in just eleven days.