Village attend MACH 2018 with Differentia Consulting

Together with our strategic alliance partner, Differentia Consulting, Village Software exhibited at MACH 2018 at the NEC in Birmingham, the UK’s premier manufacturing technologies event.

We were speaking with manufacturing businesses about the use of IOT and analytics within the manufacturing process with the aim of improving overall equipment efficiency (OEE) to create improved business performance.

We demonstrated applications that had been built using the QLIK data discovery and analytics suite. Speaking with visitors to the stand from manufacturing plants, it was clear that manufacturers are typically collecting huge amounts of data from a multitude of sources (equipment/machinery, sensors, RFID i.e. Shop floor data collection – SFDC) but really only using their ERP as a source of management information. Most discussions therefore very quickly focussed on how they could automate the collection of shop floor data, integrate this with other key data sources such as finance, materials and HR to offer management greater insight to where performance could be improved.

It was good to also speak with the ERP vendors that were at the event to see what they were offering by way of reporting, analytics and data visualisation. It’s fair to say they were only offering relatively standard and simple reporting and their solutions could benefit from having business intelligence functionality from powerful toolsets like Qlik.

I really enjoyed the show and what it did confirm for me was that business intelligence within the manufacturing sector is an essential management tool. It is also nice to know that Village are ideally placed to provide these analytical solutions, particularly with our engineering and manufacturing pedigree.