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**This is a true story, with a few details changed to protect the manufacturer’s good name.**
In an undisclosed location in the Western United States, there is a factory making kitchen cabinets. Inside that factory, a long assembly line traverses the length of the property.
At one end, skilled operators deftly glue together wooden frames and place the units on the line; in the middle, a ballet of operators add shelves, drawers and doors; and at the end, the unit is packaged up with its accessories and passed on to shipping.
It’s a lovely, choreographed sight to behold. But when the operations teams sitting a thousand miles away in corporate HQ want to actually view the beautiful process, using the surveillance cameras they installed, here's the 13-step path to get there:
Let’s put that process in perspective. In the time it takes this factory to isolate one clip of one cabinet from one station, that factory has gone on to produce dozens or hundreds of additional cabinets.
Why is this process so cumbersome? Because when they installed cameras in the factory, they installed an on-premises surveillance system. The kind you’d find in a casino or hotel. This system was not designed to function the way manufacturers should be using video.
It’s not the video, it’s how you use it
I can attest to the truth of the above scenario because I sat in this company’s headquarters and watched it unfold with my own eyes.
Once their quest to find the footage they wanted was complete, I opened up my laptop, and three seconds later, we were looking at live video from a factory thousands of miles away via the Drishti Portal.
But what really drove home the benefits of Drishti over traditional on-premises surveillance cameras was how everyone in the assembly line ecosystem could use the video.
In and around any assembly line, there are dozens of people who make decisions based on assembly line activities. Supervisors, engineers, managers, accounting teams, trainers and of course, the line associates themselves. Video makes a difference on a factory floor when it is supported by software designed specifically for manufacturing use cases.
Here’s how Drishti stacks up against on-premises surveillance systems in the factory:
In Industry 4.0, video is as integral to manufacturing as it is for professional sports teams. There’s a reason the best sports teams use video to improve their performance: visual training and process analysis are more powerful, actionable and universally understood than non-visual.
Your team will benefit in exactly the same way, but only when video is augmented with software specifically designed to support manufacturing needs.
Read more about the top 6 ways to use Drishti on your assembly line.
