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Our research into these processes or manufacturing workflows comes from hundreds of sites, located in over 35 countries around the world. They can be broken down into the following categories:

Some of our customers’ plants have over 215+ processes they have identified as critical to their business.

These processes take on many forms:

1. Reactive “Abnormality” plans: if this happens, do that
2. Standard work: Every day/shift/hour/x minutes, do this.
3. Event-based: When this occurs, you do that
4. Process Triggers: I’m done with my part, now you do yours.
5. Monitor something: When this measurement crosses this threshold, do that until it returns to the normal range

Here’s a more detailed but still partial list:

Processes are Connected

Processes may trigger one or more other processes. This can often cause a cascading effect, spurring a large volume of activity in a variety of different teams and disciplines. Visibility into this mountain of activity is difficult, to say the least. Ensuring that this activity is fully coordinated, standardized, and completed in a timely manner further underscores the challenges the shop floor faces on a daily basis. Failure of these processes results in real and serious consequences on the plant floor.

Let’s consider the example of football played at the high school and college level. It’s amazing to see the level of effort, financial resources, and hours of practice required to coordinate the intricate movements of 11 players on the field. The ability to run the plays from the playbook with exactness while anticipating and reacting to the defense is a real struggle. All that effort for just 4 quarters of game time each week. 

Football and manufacturing have some interesting similarities. Who are the players and who is the coach? Where’s the playbook? Imagine the monumental task to scale that playbook up to hundreds of operators, maintenance technicians, and supporting staff for a 24/7 manufacturing floor.

When done well, it’s nothing short of a miracle. Processes are the playbook for manufacturing. Unfortunately for most organizations, that playbook is hidden in paperwork, whiteboards, and tribal knowledge (aka people’s heads) - in short, an expert system (a system that can only be run by an expert). This is why our customers are successful: LES modules like CloudDISPATCH for workflow management are their playbook. It also tracks the performance of those plays, every time they are executed, so you can analyze and improve each one over time.

Manufacturing Process Key Points:

• Processes are interdependent on each other in complex and confusing ways.
• It’s hard to “honor the standard” in a manual process environment.
• Visibility and training are difficult ongoing problems in a manual process environment.
• Process improvement is limited and slow in a manual process environment.
• Things tend to fall through the cracks or never followed through because there is no closed-loop process. This leads to never solving the root-cause or systemic cause of the problem.

Why Are Processes Manual Today?

To understand why most processes on the shop floor are accomplished through manual methods today, we must first understand where they come from, how they are created, and who’s involved.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then process and invention must be siblings. Necessity drives process development in a big way. In our experience, all processes are created by seeing a pattern of wasted effort, time, and/or resources, and then developing a common approach to resolving problems.

We have seen that the vast majority of Processes on the shop floor have originated from problem-solving activities. These processes are real and tangible solutions to common occurrences in the manufacturing environment.

Manufacturing processes on the shop floor have a short half-life. This means that they can mutate and change on a weekly or even daily basis as the true nature of the problems are discovered.

Using L2L's CloudDISPATCH, our customers can identify a problem in the morning, have a new Digital Process in place by the afternoon, and have 3 other changes to that process the following day.

In fast-moving environments, the constantly changing requirements of these processes pose a significant barrier to entry for more sophisticated tracking and management efforts. 

Additionally, in this dynamic environment in which these processes live, it’s not uncommon for problems to seemingly be resolved within a short period of time only to have the problem recur days, weeks, or months later.

Leaving processes in place, yet dormant becomes the best practice to ensure fast reaction times in the future but can create an ever-growing maintenance burden on the IT organization.

This all creates a “perfect storm” in which traditional electronic systems fail to keep pace, custom solutions are too costly to maintain, and employee training fails to keep current.

IT is left to “reluctantly allow” the shop floor to manage these processes manually, due to their limited IT budget and a long list of high priority corporate initiatives. This leaves shop floor personnel no alternative than to resort to manual methods for tracking and reporting. 

The following table describes in simple terms how processes evolve:

Key Points:

• People create processes to solve problems.
• Manufacturing Processes evolve quickly, go dormant, and can be customized by area, line, shift, and product.
• IT isn’t agile enough nor resourced properly to build custom solutions for each and every process on the shop floor.
• People resort to inefficient manual processes and methods to “get the job done”.
• Manual processes tend to fall through the cracks and not get followed through on
• Manual processes lack important data needed to truly understand what is really impacting safety, quality, and production

Quantifying the Manufacturing Process Problem: Is This a Problem for Me?

One of the most eye-opening things about deploying our LES solution is the cumulative effect of small, innocuous problems on the overall health of the shop floor. In nearly every implementation, we discover a disconnect between what is perceived to be the largest problem to solve and the actual largest problem to solve.

It’s often the small recurring problems that are draining the resources out of an organization instead of the large, infrequent, and public problems that tend to capture attention and are typically the only things that get talked about in the daily meetings.

The problem is when you start on a continuous improvement journey, in the absence of real data, you often don’t know which of the 200+ processes and problems are the biggest ones to start working on. That’s what L2L’s CloudDISPATCH does for you.

Often these small problems and processes have a real and meaningful cost associated with them that falls just enough under the radar to avoid attention. These issues occur at scale across the entire plant with very little understanding of the true scale and scope of the problem. Over time these costs add up to significant impacts to the bottom line.

For example:

Key Points:

• The frequent small issues are typically where the organization spends most of its time and resources. These are also the most overlooked area for improvement.
• The frequent chronic issues are viewed as normal and never addressed as opportunities for improvement.
• Gaining visibility of these “hidden plant” problems is the key to successfully prioritizing and resolving them. This is the power of actionable data.
• These issues reside in every plant we’ve seen, independent of industry vertical, level of mechanization, level of technology deployment, or type of production.

• Build vs. Buy vs. Subscribe (SaaS)
• I Already Have a Plan: How Does This Fit into the Enterprise Manufacturing Software Stack?

• How Can We Accomplish Continuous Process Improvement?

• I Already Have Some of This: Flexible Add-On Modules
• We Have a Standard: Getting to a Safer Global Standard
• But I Already Have an MES: A Perfect Companion to MES
• Why Implement CloudDISPATCH Before MES?
• Need Industry 4.0 Fast?
• CMMS and L2L Next Gen Maintenance Module
• How Do You Work With My SCADA solution?
• ERP and L2L CloudDISPATCH
• IoT and L2L CloudDISPATCH

As we’ve seen above, the dynamic nature of the shop floor can seem like ADHD to an outside observer. The constantly shifting priorities and needs create havoc on the latest “agile” software development methods. The time tested methods for gathering requirements, designing solutions, implementing systems, and troubleshooting functionality is too slow to keep pace with the rate of change and the sheer numbers of new processes created each week on the shop floor. The prioritization process alone can't budget IT resource time for these types of projects due to the size and speed of change. When considering the cost of redundant server hardware and software licensing, IT resource salaries, and ongoing software development resources to develop and maintain the solution, it quickly becomes obvious that building this type of solution internally is a non-starter.

Selecting a traditional enterprise vendor solution is a non-starter as well. These vendors have been engineered top to bottom to extract large quantities of money from their customers through professional service engagements. They love chasing these ever-changing requirements and have very little incentive to deliver when billable hours are to be had trying to capture the latest set of requirements. When pressed to finish the project, the result is an overpriced solution that is specific to one area of the shop floor that doesn’t fit the current workflow on the shop floor. This leads to what’s called pilot purgatory: A project that consumes valuable organizational resources with no ability to scale to the rest of the organization.

Our customers are succeeding by adopting a subscribe mentality that utilizes our innovative and unique technology designed to adapt to shop floor needs. They know we can deliver the customized solution they demand, at a price point that is a fraction of the price of building or buying a traditional on-premise solution. Often at less than the salary of 1 employee per site. And we can implement in 45 days, in stark contrast to the months and years of more traditional methods.

Key Points:

• Since Processes change so fast, building custom internal solutions is more expensive than subscribing to a cloud-based LES
• All enterprise vendor solutions require costly professional services to get something that is useful for only the basic processes on the shop floor. They have no cost-effective way to keep pace with the constant change of the shop floor.
• Subscribing to L2L's LES is the fastest and most cost-effective solution for digitizing the processes on the shop floor.

The manufacturing software landscape is a confusing mix of approaches with vendors from every angle vying for a piece of the pie. You have hardware vendors trying to get into the software business, and accounting ERP vendors trying to extend accounting-based approaches down to the shop floor. You have integration vendors trying to glue everything together.

IoT vendors generating piles of useless “Big Data” bound for the Data Graveyard never to be seen again, and AI / Machine learning vendors offering to “read the tea leaves” of your big data with little to no understanding of the true context of that data. Not to mention the dashboarding and business intelligence vendors trying to turn heads with different views of the same old tired data. All of which are promoting the same overarching company benefits with little to no clear plan and ROI to deliver on that promise.

From our Extensive Research, we’ve uncovered a number of missing elements in manufacturing systems available today that when applied lead to much greater success.

These critical elements are why these tools are not effective on the shop floor, resulting in disparate manual or homegrown methods. Among these missing elements in the traditional manufacturing, software stack is the lack of systematic follow-through, problem-solving, and process improvement, while also ignoring the common activities workflow management software addresses on the shop floor.

It’s as if these software packages either assume:

1. The problem is in building a better plan (I.e. If I could have known more information, my plan could have accounted for that problem ahead of time.),
2. Once a problem is identified and visible, it will magically solve itself,
3. The perfect plan will solve all of the problems when they don’t even fully understand what the actual problems are today,
4. Or they lack the understanding that even the perfect plan will encounter issues that must be addressed in a timely manner to ensure success.

L2L's LES, on the other hand, is focused on the abnormalities and process surrounding how an organization deals with problems on the shop floor.

We are a continuous improvement engine that drives prompt issue resolution through accountability, visibility, escalation management, problem-solving, and process improvement. In this respect, we work alongside all of the major manufacturing systems, and extend these systems and their processes to facilitate continuous improvement.

These systems include, but are not limited to:

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO) - Production Planning and Execution Systems
• Material Resource Planning (MRP) / Logistics
• Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)
• Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) 
• Warehouse Management System (WMS)
• Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) 
• Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
• Quality Management Systems (QMS)
• Human Machine Interface (HMI)
• Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA)
• Programmable Logic Controller (PLC)
• Distributed Control System (DCS)
• Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
  
  
  
  

  Key Points:

  • The manufacturing software stack marketplace is confusing due to the over-promising of vendors
  • L2L's LES is an addition to the enterprise software stack. 
  • LES is focused on digitizing and improving the reactionary processes of the shop floor. This is a space no other one system is tackling.
  • LES fills in the gaps that ERP, MES, SCADA, etc. don't fill. This is why there are so many manual methods being used on the production floor. This is also why IT is faced with dealing with so many internally built systems/databases. 

As we have described above, manufacturing runs on processes. Our ability to digitize these processes is only half of the solution. Most systems on the floor today focus on the “Break / Fix” cycle in that they help identify problems, provide some rudimentary notifications, and reporting. With the exception of CMMS, the tracking of the work involved fixing or resolving the issue is typically assumed to happen outside of the systems.

L2L's LES has full support for the Break / Fix cycle. This provides key data for supporting process improvement through the “Root Cause” cycle and corporate-wide continuous improvement through the “Yokoten” cycle. This added functionality provides a systematic framework for sustainable continuous process improvement. 

Key Points:

• LES provides wider & more useful functionality in the Break / Fix Cycle than MES and CMMS 
• LES provides built-in Root Cause and Yokoten functionality that creates sustainable continuous process improvement across the entire enterprise. 

Over the years the L2L's LES solution has grown significantly in the area of Add-On or Optional Modules. These modules have come directly from customer suggestions and enhancements. They have been battle-tested on the shop floor to ensure they exceed expectations of end-users in over 35 countries around the world. Many of these modules grew out of watching our customers create processes within our core functionality that we never dreamed of.

As their use of the system grew, we logically extended these modules to accommodate more and more advanced processes and use cases. In many cases, customers asked for these modules to fill gaps in their existing infrastructure.

In others, we extended our world-class Application Programming Interface (APIs) to allow customers to integrate their existing trusted systems to our core functionality instead of using our add-on modules if a corporate “system of record” mandate applies with existing systems.

Whether you use our add-on modules or integrate into our existing system, L2L is focused on providing you the flexibility to improve at your own rate and in your own way. Our success is measured by your improvement month over month and year over year. That is our end goal. Our add-on modules are provided to fill in gaps and to bridge you to success.

Our add-on modules include:

• CloudDISPATCH (workflow management)
• Maintenance (CMMS)
• Production
• Lean Tools
• Skills
• Project Management

Key Points:

• LES is a flexible platform that allows users to mix and match the modules they deploy based on their existing systems.

This flexibility provides several distinct advantages to IT departments and the shop floor. We rarely see an enterprise that has one standard ERP and MES deployed across all of its manufacturing sites. They all have a multi-year plan to rip and replace those systems in an attempt to have a common corporate global standard. This approach to a global standard is noble to be sure, grand in its scope, and fraught with peril. It’s our unfortunate experience that many CIOs and VPs have come and gone during the “ten-year” of these projects. 

However, we have seen great success in deploying the LES platform to standardize the manufacturing process environment and thereby masking the various differences between site-level MES and ERP systems. This approach is a fast path to a global standard that can pacify those requiring all of the benefits of a global standard and thus relieving the pressure of delivering an ERP or MES replacement in a rushed or risky manner. This allows IT to tackle their corporate projects on a more realistic timeframe with all of the safeguards a project of that scope demands.

Key Points:

• L2L's LES is a faster and safer path to standardizing manufacturing operations on a global scale.
• Deploying the LES first allows IT organizations to swap out MES or ERP systems with little impact on the shop floor.

Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are unfortunately seen as a panacea for all shop floor problems. This has lead to growing backlash as MES deployments are failing to live up to the hype surrounding them. Truth be told, MES has the following sweet spot for certain heavy machine-centric “Discrete or Batch” production verticals needing:

• Track and Trace product genealogy
• Recipe Management including changeover error proofing of machine settings
• Process Control and measurement where product mix is variable and requires statistical level attention to control the product quality
• Alerting when the machine stops, faults, or detects a condition out of the norm

Items MES does not solve:

• Manage the break/fix actions required to get the machine up and running. MES can be useful for identifying and alerting machine-centric problems to employees but that's where they stop and the hidden plant processes start.
• The root cause reasons for the machine stoppage.
• Non-machine process breakdowns that lead to the stoppage.
• Process improvement and coordination with other teams running the same machines and processes.
• Reporting bigger picture metrics at the line, area, and site-level that are not all machine-related. (I.e. OA% and OEE% contributors that are not machine-related.)
• Gaining situational awareness of challenges on the shop floor that are not machine-related.
• Facilitating the processes in departments, not directly related to production, that are critical in supporting production needs (shipping, testing labs, HR, purchasing, spare parts, document control, etc..)

In the rush to deploy MES we suggest a comprehensive approach, customers need to determine why they need MES. Consider the following questions:

• Do you have PLCs to connect to? Or is your environment mostly manual assembly, old equipment without PLC control system, single part build or job shop?
• Is MES required for your business, or is SCADA enough?
• Do I need Track and Trace, Recipe Management, or Enhanced Process Control outside of my existing control systems?
• Do I have Engineering related product problems where closer scrutiny of the machine settings and sensor data will be useful?

It should be obvious, but it’s worth restating that L2L's LES is not an MES. In our experience, MES is costly and difficult to deploy. And once deployed it can only alert you to machine-centric problems. From our extensive research, across multiple industries such as automotive, electronics, food processing, chemical, etc., these problems typically represent 10-12% of the total problems and processes on the shop floor. Based on this perspective, we recommend deploying the LES first to make the biggest impact on the shop floor. Then let the LES data guide to the areas where MES will have the biggest impact on machine-related issues.

How we extend MES for continuous improvement

1. We use MES data and metrics to launch processes outside of the machine
2. We help make machine alerts actionable and trackable by launching dispatches that close the loop and require action
3. We extend operator interfaces to simplify data collection where no MES data exists (no PLCs, old incompatible hardware/control systems, manual processes, etc.)
4. We provide portals and dashboards for other plant teams working with this production data to manually and/or automatically launch processes based on the data.
5. We track and make visible the processes the MES data originates.
6. Our extensive experience has shown that machine originated events are only a portion (small) of the overall interferences on the shop floor. Solving these other issues first provides the greatest increases in plant productivity. And can highlight the most effective areas for machine integration and investment. 

Key Points:

• MES is focused on machine-centric problems. Those represent a small percentage of the overall issues.
• MES is good for Track & Trace Genealogy, Recipe Management, and Machine Control.
• LES works well with MES
• Deploying LES is a faster path to success and can provide focus to where MES should be implemented first
• Most of our current customer base has an MES system in place, some of which are considered to be benchmarks in the industry
• Most customers have shared their challenges and frustrations implementing their MES system and that they wished they’d started with L2L

To learn more about a proven approach to MES and LES, checkout our guide:  So You Think You Need an MES...

The macro trend in the manufacturing industry is a move toward digitization. The key buzz words are Industry 4.0, Digital Twin, Digital Transformation, Digital Manufacturing, Digital Factory, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT or IoT). By and large, these initiatives are machine and engineering-focused and are tightly integrated with the Big Data and AI / Machine learning trends. The reasons for this are economic in nature and come from vendors that make money selling new hardware and software upgrades.

This machine-centric view of the manufacturing shop floor emphasizes the importance of the machine and neglects the people and process pillars of manufacturing success. This is logical since hardware and software vendors are typically not built to manage the ever-changing landscape of people and processes. So they stick to what they know.

Our experience proves that the low hanging fruit for improving the shop floor is found in the people and processes, in conjunction with the machines. Since people and processes are so quickly changed and updated, this is the real strength in our approach and the way we are so fast to achieve value. Given these advantages and our unique technologically advanced solution, we can demonstrate a faster path to Industry 4.0 value. We call this holistic approach, (People, Process, & Machines), Manufacturing 4.0.

People are your biggest and best change agent. Your employees are a highly adaptable and versatile intelligent smart sensor platform. They can detect problems traditional IoT sensor deployments can’t. For a real digital transformation to occur within an organization, you must have a strategy to include the People and Processes.

By digitizing the Processes on your shop floor you provide a repeatable standard that can be tuned and refined to the point where machine automation is a real option. There is a reason humans are used first to pioneer a new process before you choose to lock it down into a repeatable robotic platform, automated production line, or software solution. Let them innovate and iterate the process quickly. 

Key Points:

• Industry 4.0 is a major trend that often overlooks the value from People and Processes
• Manufacturing 4.0 is our term for Digital Transformation that encompass People, Processes, and Machines
• LES is a faster and lower-cost path to Industry 4.0

Traditional CMMS’s are siloed systems that isolate maintenance data from production, quality, and the rest of the shop floor. L2L's next gen Maintenance module is purposely designed to integrate the maintenance organization into operations by making production the main focus. We’ve also designed L2L's CloudDISPATCH to be utilized as an indispensable tool aiding the maintenance department to do their jobs within the greater context of production vs. a task, or mandated requirement to collect data for management, but doesn’t make their work easier.

Traditional CMMS software provides advantages over the paper and Excel spreadsheets of the past, but it cannot meet the demands of the modern factory, and how we need to operate

In order to succeed. Basically, the maintenance department needs to be run like a business; a profit center that must provide value. Otherwise, you’ll never get any support from management and feel like you’re constantly losing ground. It’s time to stop looking at the maintenance department the way we did 30, 20, or even 1 year(s) ago.

In today’s fast-changing global environment, companies are less likely to invest in high-cost maintenance solutions that take years to implement and struggle to provide an ROI. In some cases, equipment and products are changing faster than other CMMS’ have time to analyze. In this environment, it is essential to get the best information in front of the maintenance team to help aid in troubleshooting and problem-solving.

The Future of Operational Maintenance

We need to look at the maintenance department as a value add to the business that’s helping drive the overall company metrics (safety, quality, cost, and delivery).

Instead of changing a bearing out every 12 months because that’s how it’s always been done, you need to look at ways to make the bearing last longer and/or even signal the team before there is an actual problem. It’s time to start looking at utilizing all the options available to aid your maintenance team in becoming more effective.

L2L's Maintenance module combined with CloudDISPATCH help you look at every maintenance activity as an opportunity for improvement.  It equips the maintenance organization with tools to quickly evaluate and prioritize problem-solving. It also addresses maintenance from a production-centric view, where all maintenance activities should be done in the most efficient and effective way possible so that the impact on production is minimized.

A pit crew may want to change the tires on the car to avoid a tire blow out on the track.  The driver knows that the goal isn’t to avoid a blowout, it’s to win the race. The goal of a manufacturer is to produce a product with efficiency, quality, and safety. Therefore our approach to maintenance is very different than typical systems on the market today, and why we are commonly displacing large established systems like Maximo, SAP PM, eMaint, etc. 

Shifting your maintenance department from a mentality of maintaining, toward a continuous improvement mindset with a goal of perfection should be your vision. Every maintenance organization should have a relentless focus on the elimination of maintenance (no more maintenance).

Key Points:

• L2L Maintenance puts operations and company profitability as the main focus
• L2L's next gen Maintenance module is displacing traditional CMMS systems once viewed as the industry benchmarks (Maximo, SAP-PM, EAM, etc.)

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is a useful control and data collection of shop floor machines. We are not a SCADA solution, but we consume data from SCADA solutions to provide situational awareness, alert users, and trigger processes within the L2L LES platform. This data is typically used in our production module for recording product completions and scrap counts. It can also be useful for triggering processes in the maintenance and CloudDISPATCH modules to engage people to respond to events on the shop floor.

SCADA is useful for collecting sensors, PLC performance, and fault code data. We normally see engineering use this data from machine improvement projects. LES can bring much-needed context and priority to these projects by helping the organization see these projects in relation to the broader context and needs of the organization.

Having LES provide the prioritization and visibility of the most pressing issues on the shop floor helps plant staff focus on the high priority projects first. We see real value in SCADA data for troubleshooting machine level issues during the Root Cause Analysis cycle. For this reason, the best practice is to deploy LES data to direct resources to use SCADA data at the appropriate time instead of letting SCADA direct the behavior on the shop floor.

Common Areas of SCADA Integration:

• Product completions
• Scrap counts
• Machine Cycles for Predictive Maintenance
• Abnormal Event Escalation

Key Points:

• LES works well with SCADA Solutions

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are a foundational part of the back office. Without ERP, customers can’t place orders, raw materials can’t be ordered, and finished goods can’t be shipped. Having accurate financials is critical for success. Your accounting team has spent years refining their methods to account for every penny. ERP’s deep roots in the accounting space can be seen in the strict rules governing every financial transaction. This attention to detail can mean the difference between getting paid and closing the doors. 

The most ERP approach to manufacturing is asset-based. This Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) approach is rooted in maintenance activities for the purpose of recording the costs associated with the upkeep of individual machines for accounting purposes. An asset or machine-based approach tends to ignore the People and Process pillars of Manufacturing Success. This methodology limits the level of success by trapping that data in a “Maintenance System Solo.” There is a significant and meaningful gap EAM misses.

Unfortunately, the shop floor is a very messy place. It’s full of exceptions, workarounds, and “good enough” manual data tracking methods. This is where the clean and orderly world of accounting meets the hidden plant. Over the years we’ve seen customers fail at deploying ERP designed solutions for the shop floor because they are inflexible, inefficient, and don’t honor the realities of the shop floor environment. There is a reason we don’t hire accountants to work on the shop floor, why would we expect an accounting solution to be any different?

The good news is that LES can bridge this cultural divide between the shop floor and the back office. Our easy to use and straightforward API is perfect for integrating into all of the major ERP systems like SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, and QAD. The results data is demonstrably cleaner, more accurate, and more actionable as a result.

List of Common ERP Vendors:

• SAP
• Oracle / JD Edwards
• QAD

Key Points:

• LES works really well with ERP Systems
• ERP systems are ill-suited for the dynamic and messy shop floor environment
• The LES platform API makes integrating easy and straightforward, resulting in better and more accurate data for finance.

IoT is a major trend in the industry. L2L's LES has been designed from the ground up with a robust Application Programming Interface (API) that provides great connectivity to IoT platforms. We have customers all over the world that have integrated a wide variety of sensors and solutions into the LES platform.

Where IoT platforms shine is their ability to collect, store, and analyze data from independent sensors and hardware. These platforms may also have the ability to alert users to abnormal conditions or when the measurements trend outside of defined control limits over time. Knowing there is a problem is the first step toward resolution, for data to be actionable you need a system to track the process thereafter. That’s where LES becomes the perfect fit for IoT platforms. We provide the Break / Fix cycle management to ensure problems identified by the IoT platforms are resolved in a timely and complete manner. When you combine that with LES’s Root Cause Analysis and Yokoten Cycle functionality you get the perfect system for process improvement.

LES has an added benefit of being able to highlight the areas on the shop floor where additional IoT investment would make sense and provide a useful ROI. For that reason, the best practice is to deploy L2L's LES first and let it help direct your IoT efforts toward the areas where the most value can be gained.

Key Points:

• LES works really well with IoT Platforms (easy to deploy in hours/days)
• LES makes IoT data actionable and useful at a low cost 
• Deploy LES first to focus your IoT investments for Maximum ROI