SmartFactory
Guides, news and field notes
Everything we publish, in three kinds: guides that explain something you can act on, news from OneTek and the wider industry, and field notes logging our own installs.
Guides
Written for anyone weighing up production monitoring. Each one is useful whether or not you ever buy anything from us.
BICS: evidencing the electricity split
What a mixed-output site has to show for the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme, why a 49% estimate gets half the relief of a 50% one, and what metering fitted now can and cannot do.
Read the guideChoosing production monitoring software
What monitoring, MES, ERP and SCADA actually mean, ten questions to send a vendor, and the things a trial cannot tell you — ours included.
Read the guideOEE dashboard examples
What belongs on a shift board, a manager’s weekly and a director’s monthly — with the spreadsheet formulas, the Pareto rules, and the averaging trap that breaks most factory OEE figures.
Read the guideManufacturing systems glossary
Twenty-eight terms — MES, MRP, SCADA, OEE, TEEP, SPC, OPC UA — defined the way the floor uses them, including the dozen that get used two different ways.
Read the guideCp vs Cpk
What Cp measures, what Cpk adds, why the sigma estimator has to be named — and how much data a capability study needs before the number means anything.
Read the guideClimate Change Agreements, in plain English
What a CCA target measures, what missing it costs, and what per-machine energy data can and cannot do about it.
Read the guideOEE in plain English
What availability, performance and quality actually measure — and how an OEE figure gets flattered on its way to a board pack.
Read the guideBuilding the business case
Value drivers, a pilot with its decision rule written before it starts, and an honest answer to “we tried this before”.
Read the guideMade Smarter funding
Who qualifies, what match funding does to your cash flow, and what applying actually involves.
Read the guideShop-floor network requirements
Coverage at the far press, ports near the machines, cabling that survives a welder, and a comms room that is not a shelf.
Read the guideNews
What is happening at OneTek and in the wider industry.
Field notes
Logs of what we are actually doing on site — what we installed, what we found, and what we got wrong. Written for engineers. Accounts of our own work, not instructions for yours.
Instrumenting a press with no OPC UA
Metering a press with no data port: the instrument, proving the register map, three cycle sources, and the reading we refused to trust.
Read the field note
The sample rate that was lying to us
We sampled a 12-second stroke every 30 seconds, then nearly aged the data out in a way that overstated energy by 2.8 times.
Read the field noteROI calculator
Put your machine count, hours, downtime and scrap rate in, and it tells you what a single percentage point is worth on your floor. Every number in it comes from you.
OEE calculator
Five figures off one shift, and the three components come out with the awkward number left in: raw and capped performance side by side, so a stale standard cycle shows up instead of being quietly hidden.
Ask us something we haven’t written up yet.
If you are weighing up production monitoring and there is a question these pages do not answer, send it over. An engineer will answer it, and if it comes up twice more it will end up on this page.