Predictive Lean Operating Systems will become the norm. It’s clear Lean Operating Systems drive productivity at all levels of the business through continuous improvement. The problem with traditional Lean Operating Systems is the root cause analysis and continuous improvement happens after an unplanned variance occurs e.g. a missed delivery, unplanned machine downtime, poor quality, and losses in earned hours. With connected enterprise data and AI supported predictive analytics Lean Operating Systems can and will predict variances before they happen.
As an example, take a Hitachi customer who converts large steel products. The company historically loss a large portion of their capacity to setups due to wrong raw material being fed into the process. Now with connected data from the enterprise scheduling system and operational data from the process PLCs, predictive analytics are applied predicting wrong raw material. With predictive lean operating systems, these three hours of frustration become a quick and painless few seconds of predictive data analysis with an alert sent to the operator predicting the problem and preventing the productivity loss.