For machine shops, the transformation that data-driven manufacturing promises to bring begins with machine monitoring, and there is a human component to this.

Data holds the promise to transform manufacturing. And with that one word, “data,” I am referring to a lot. I mean the increasing ease and advancing capabilities for interconnecting machines, sensing and gathering useful information, guiding machines automatically, and finding insights in the data flowing out of manufacturing systems. How all of this capability will affect manufacturing is unclear, and much of the promise in these areas is still in the future, but it is the near future. For machine shops, though, there is an obvious starting point. The first step is to monitor CNC machines—networking CNCs to report data into a single, unified system for analyzing machining performance. Just this step is transformative, as many shops have discovered.