Many manufacturing companies operate non-digitized factories. Out of 10 million factories, about 80% of them remain unconnected and capture data about their operations manually. The problem there is that managers don’t get enough data to make real-time decisions. But, with ThingTrax, the situation could be much different.
ThingTrax is an intelligent manufacturing platform that allows you to capture accurate data, increase productivity, and provide insights that drive business performance. This article reviews everything you need to know about ThingTrax, its features, subscription plans, and policies.
ThingTrax is a manufacturing performance platform that promotes the efficiency of machinery, helps engage your entire workforce, and drives high performance. Before the establishment of the company in 2015, many manufacturing companies operated non-digitized factories. They had pieces of machinery that were at least over ten years old and operated in the offline mode.
Operating these old but functioning machines was a problem for these companies. The process was inefficient and often resulted in low productivity. In fact, there was no way to digitize these existing machines except when they abandoned them. That wasn’t the best way to solve the problem.
As a result, there was a need to bring these machines online, create smart factories, and digitize the process. ThingTrax’s solutions excellently meet those needs.
The software employs innovative solutions to every aspect of manufacturing operations. It employs effective technologies to increase the capture and analysis of data and the delivery of information that promotes business growth. The software also employs various technologies to drive operational and behavioral change throughout your workforce and unlock their true potential.
So far, ThingTrax has partnered with various reputable companies such as Berry, Carclo, Silafrica, and Desch Plantpak. Besides catering to the manufacturing industry, ThingTrax also offers its services to businesses in the plastic, food and beverage, and building materials industries.
Rating: 4.4/5
ThingTrax is an efficient software that helps digitize and create a smart process within factories. If you have old pieces of machinery, you can’t abandon them. You should, instead, employ the service of the intelligent manufacturing platform to help you out.
In addition, we discovered that the company’s devices, like the IoT V2 sensor and AI-enabled camera, are very efficient. They capture real data and analyze them to give real-time insights. This is particularly useful if you want to check your worker’s performance and ensure productivity. These insights can also influence the decision-making process and drive business growth.
The software is also a great option to ensure that your product meets the industry’s requirements. We observed that it easily collects customer’s complaints and let us know the areas of improvement. We then use this insight to clear out any errors and deliver high-quality products to our customers.
Despite its advantages, we also discovered that the platform has some flaws. The customer support channels are limited, which can delay responses. While the website has a contact form, we believe it will only lead to a delay in operations. To avoid this, the platform should provide other customer support channels, such as email addresses or phone numbers.
Nonetheless, ThingTrax is an efficient, intelligent manufacturing platform that helps you digitize processes, promote workforce performance, and drive business growth.
ThingTrax has comprehensive features, with each contributing to an improved user experience. Below, we will discuss the platform’s seven features and let you know how you can get a better experience.
The leadership dashboard is a control panel for CEOs. It provides real-time visibility of the organization’s progress and enables them to know about the performance of their operations. With this feature, leaders can identify the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of their companies.
This feature consists of KPI reporting that allows leaders to have a detailed view of their operational performance. They can also view their KPIs at a macro level or drill down into detailed specifics. This enables the leaders to ask the right questions or initiate problem-solving processes.
Additionally, the feature comprises internal and external benchmarks that the leaders can use to compare manufacturing performance. These benchmarks enable leaders to identify best practices and leverage industry data. It also allows them to assess the company’s competitiveness within the industry.
There is also trend analysis that allows leaders to identify positive or negative trends. It provides a real-time trend report that enables leaders to assess the impact of their decisions.
The feature also allows third-party manufacturing experts to troubleshoot difficult problems and address manufacturing performance issues. This provides new insights that solve challenging problems within the company.
Finally, you can also integrate this feature with other features to have valuable data and gain a full organizational view. This enables the company to know whether there is progress on their set goals and objectives.
This feature introduces the Lean Six Sigma best practices to your organization. It prompts the employees to focus on their goals, track their tasks, and improve accountability within the organization.
It consists of numerous sub-features that solve challenging problems. First is daily meetings. This feature ensures consistency and provides organization-wide visibility. It provides clear, easy-to-follow templates for daily meetings so that teams follow the approach.
This enables leaders to gain insights into the workings of their company. They can identify problems, track team progress, review meeting minutes, and assess the organization’s progress.
There is also task management that allows leaders to assign tasks to teammates and solve problems. These tasks are reviewed at each huddle to ensure continued progress. It also offers a disciplined approach that provides documentation of non-compliance or performance issues.
Workflow is another sub-feature of daily management. Here, there is a series of step-and-check workflows that ensure continuous improvement of best practices.
It allows teams to have a defined process that caters to their unique needs.
It also allows leaders to make sure that the employees aren’t inventing their method of established processes in the area of 5s inspections, Gemba walks, or quality inspections. This provides numerous benefits, such as reduced training time and workload and increased efficiency.
There is also a scheduling sub-feature that assigns and schedules multi-step processes such as quality inspections, audits, and accident reporting. This informs the employees on upcoming tasks, improves efficiency, and heightens productivity. Leaders can also get insight and track KPI progress through the reporting sub-feature.
ThingTrax employs different devices that capture analog or digital signals from your equipment and workers. These devices consider factors like vibration, temperature, and workload and interpret them into real-time insights for managers.
They utilize the IoT V2 sensors that turn manufacturing equipment into data sources and provide information. It is easy to install and doesn’t require any infrastructure changes. These devices capture digital or analog electrical signals from the factory floor and convert them into actionable insights.
They also install AI-enabled cameras that capture images and process them into real-time data. This helps to improve productivity within the organization.
ThingTrax also provides tablet-based operators that show manufacturer operators all the information needed to run their equipment. It displays equipment diagnostics, allows operators to input data, and ensures operators’ accountability.
They also encourage visual displays of the workplace by installing large-screen displays on factory floors. This enables the managers to track employee’s productivity and reduce nonstandard performances.
You can reduce the maintenance cost of your factory’s machinery through this feature. There is an overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) analysis that measures the productivity of manufacturing operations. The OEE also provides a real-time view to identify issues, address them, and reduce waste.
There is also an automated maintenance scheduling that allows maintenance professionals to plan and schedule recurring maintenance effectively. The IoT sensors and cameras also create room for predictive maintenance. It triggers and sends alerts to the maintenance team so that they can take proactive action and prevent critical failure of the factory’s machinery.
This feature also allows the use of AI and machine learning models to predict future OEE. They look at previous OEE data, take note of correlations, and consider these factors to determine the quality, availability, and performance of a machine.
This approach further allows the operators to take preventive actions to make informed decisions, optimize performance, and enhance production efficiency.
Every organization aims to curb inefficiency and improve productivity. That is what ThingTrax’s productivity does. It adopts the OEE analysis to understand where inefficiency exists, address key issues, reduce waste, and improve productivity.
Here, the team also utilizes drag-and-drop tools to lay out accurate plans in advance. These plans enable the team to have a clear understanding of the production pipeline and envision the number of outputs they need to produce, adjust, and deliver customers’ demands.
This produces numerous benefits, such as more revenue per machine, reduced administrative overhead, more customer orders, and reduced inventory carrying costs.
The organization also employs hardware suites such as AI-guided cameras to monitor manual assembly activities and produce quantitative data. This data enables them to identify operating issues, improve product quality, and optimize the work cycle.
The productivity suite also provides comprehensive reports that are useful for problem identification and resolution. The suite also provides reports on downtime analysis, factory benchmarking, shift benchmarking, and waste loss.
The goal of every manufacturing company is to provide a quality product that guarantees customer satisfaction.
ThingTrax’s quality suite enables manufacturers to solve problems systematically and track customers’ complaints effectively. It logs and tracks these complaints and ensures they are resolved effectively.
By resolving the complaints, the manufacturers improve the quality of their products and satisfy their customers. This further promotes trust, leads to more sales, and improves business performance.
The company also implements the 8D principles to promote collaborative workflow and address systemic problems.
They assign problems to team members and give them the required actions to resolve them.
This tasks the employee with a clear accountability of the problem. Once the tasks are assigned, the system tracks the task progress and provides the entire team with visibility on how to handle such tasks.
Finally, the company provides in-line quality monitoring using vision analytics to identify production faults and resolve the issues. Altogether, the quality suite evolves the entire workforce into a problem-solving culture.
Many manufacturing companies find it difficult to avoid environmental issues and create sustainable issues. However, the case is different with ThingTrax.
ThingTrax helps manufacturers measure and report on energy usage, CO2 emissions, and health and safety issues. They monitor the energy consumption to reduce its cost.
They use IoT sensors and cameras to identify the pieces of machinery that consume the most energy and reduce energy costs. It also examines the energy cost of a particular product and measures the general energy usage in the company.
The sustainability suite also provides a detailed report on the employee’s safety. It gives alerts on high-risk behavior and prioritizes the safety of workers. This suite also gives detailed reporting on carbon emissions. It provides a useful report that tracks your organization’s commitments to its sustainability goals.
The company’s pricing details aren’t revealed on their website. However, you can book a demo to understand how the product works. You can also fill out a contact form to get a specific quote.
ThingTrax’s privacy policy governs users on their access, how they use the website, the information they collect, and consumer’s data protection rights and choices.
The website collects and uses various data relating to its website and app. They collect customer data such as your name, address, telephone number, email address, location, and company profile. They use this information for marketing purposes, cookies, and billing purposes, and share it with third-party services such as Google and HubSpot.
They also transfer the data obtained from you to organizations outside the European Economic Area (EEA), most especially the United States. The company ensures to use your data in a just manner and avoid violations. They also protect and uphold your data protection rights and avoid breaches.
The team offers 24/7 support for their services. But you must note that they don’t provide an email address, phone number, or live chat app that you can use to reach out to them.
Instead, if you have any complaints or want to inquire about their products, you must fill out the contact form on their website.
You can also visit their physical address in the case of any inquiries:
ThingTrax Ltd
Centurion House,
London Road,
Stained-Upon-Thames,
England
TW18 4AX.
Every manufacturer needs to have a smart factory and digitize their processes. Smart factories cater to an efficient process, improve productivity, and drive high business performance. With a manufacturing performance platform like Thing Trax, you can create a smart factory that suits your desires and increases profits. If you wish to learn more about ThingTrax, you should book a demo to have first-hand experience of their services.
Contributors: Funmito OBAFEMI (Technical Writer), John Ayanfe (Graphic Designer)