OEE — Overall Equipment Effectiveness — is the most widely cited number in manufacturing. Every plant manager knows their OEE figure. Most can quote it to a decimal point. It sits on dashboards, it goes in board reports, it gets…
For as long as industrial robots have existed, there’s been a vision attached to them. The robots do the work. The humans pursue higher things. Go to the beach, read a good book, watch a film — whatever you want…
Every so often someone asks how RoboVigil stacks up against Fabrico. It’s a fair question, because on the surface they look like they’re in the same world — both cloud platforms, both aimed at manufacturers, both talking about machine uptime.…
People sometimes ask why a machine monitoring platform needs cameras. The data tells you the machine has stopped, an alarm code tells you why — what’s the camera for? The honest answer is that the data only ever tells you…
There’s a pattern I’ve seen in manufacturing every time the economy tightens, and I’m seeing it again now. Nobody’s signing off on new capital equipment. The quotes go in, they get filed under “next year,” and the existing kit gets…
Every machine has a reliability curve, and it’s not flat. Equipment is at its most reliable somewhere in the middle of its life — past the early teething problems, before the wear sets in. After that, things start to drift.…
If you’re evaluating OEE and machine monitoring platforms, Evocon should come up. They’ve been around since 2010, they’re used in over 1,000 factories across 50 countries, and they have strong case studies from companies like Mars and Saint-Gobain. They’re a…
Injection moulding is one of the few manufacturing processes where the machine itself already speaks a standardised monitoring language. Euromap 77, the OPC-UA companion specification for injection moulding machines, defines a common data model across manufacturers — Engel, Arburg, KraussMaffei,…
ABB IRC5 robots are everywhere — welding cells, palletisers, machine tending, packaging lines. But most are effectively invisible once the factory lights go out. If a robot faults overnight, production stays down until somebody physically notices. RoboVigil connects directly to…
OPC-UA is a protocol that lets monitoring software read data directly from your machines — cycle times, fault codes, spindle speeds, program states, temperatures — without proprietary drivers or middleware. If you’re evaluating machine monitoring platforms, you’ll see OPC-UA mentioned…
If you’re evaluating cloud-based machine monitoring platforms, MachineCDN will come up. They’re an aggressive content marketer — their blog ranks for dozens of comparison keywords — and they position themselves as the fastest path from raw machine data to actionable…
If you’re researching machine monitoring platforms, MachineMetrics should be on your list. They’re the most well-known name in the space, particularly in CNC machining. They’ve raised over $30 million in venture funding and they’ve connected thousands of machines. RoboVigil is…
Universal Robots cobots are everywhere — over 100,000 deployed worldwide, running everything from machine tending to palletising to welding. But once they’re on the factory floor, most sites have no way to monitor them remotely. The cobot is either running,…
If you’re evaluating machine monitoring platforms in the UK, FourJaw and RoboVigil should both appear on your shortlist. They’re both cloud-based, both aimed at manufacturers running 5 to 200 machines, and both priced in a similar range. But they take…
Most factory managers aren’t comparing monitoring platforms. They’re deciding whether to monitor at all. The machines are running, parts are shipping, and the whiteboard in the office has some OEE calculations on it from last Thursday. Good enough, right? Here’s…
We all love a yellow robot. If you’re running FANUC robots with R-30iB Plus controllers and you want cloud-based monitoring without installing any hardware on-site, this guide walks you through how to connect them to RoboVigil using the controller’s built-in…
