There have been two sea changes since the widespread introduction of QMS solutions in manufacturing environment—and a third change is on its way.
In the first wave, manufacturers began to instrument and automate their facilities. They consolidated assembly procedures, removed manual and repetitive tasks, and introduced robotics. At the same time, manufacturers began to realize that their automated solutions produced data in massive amounts. Using this data at first proved challenging. Data scientists using early analytic solutions could only do so much, which meant that although manufacturers could derive insights from data, they couldn’t do this on a real-time basis or find hidden patterns.