Real time's role in product quality: solutions that enable live tracking of production processes lead to lower costs, happier customers. (Applications & Services).

Manufacturing Business Technology, May, 2005 by Hill, Sidney, Jr.

How valuable is real-time production data? To one company--ElkCorp--it's worth at least $6,000 an hour. That's how much the company loses whenever the production lines go down at its Shafter, Calif., plant, where it makes roofing shingles. To avoid downtime, ElkCorp monitors nearly all of its processes in real time, hoping to catch and fix problems before they disrupt production.

For the most part, it works. "Our downtime has been cut at least in half over the [10-year] life of the plant," says Paul Rogers, an ElkCorp systems engineer. "And we are constantly finding ways of reducing downtime even further through the use of real-time data." Analysts, consultants, and other industry gurus have been preaching the virtues of real-time data...

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