Player Piano and MT Connect

I recently read Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut. The book is about a society that has had almost all manufacturing automated away, and the skilled labor relegated to fixing potholes, essentially being paid to do nothing.

The beginning of the book goes over how things are made. So at one point bright young engineers devised a way to record the movements of master machinists and play them back over again, obviating the need for machinists. Aside from the issue of how you'd go about making a new product or process change without a machinist to record, the idea had to be intriguing in 1952 when the book came out.

The really interesting part, though, is Vonnegut's description of the status display in the office in a factory (which had about 3 people working, total). The display simply shows a brass plaque for each machine, with a status lamp that would flash red if there was a problem.

The point of the book has little to do with how the factories worked, instead dealing with the resentment between the few people who still had meaningful jobs, and those that didn't. It did, however, get me to think a bit about what the point of MT Connect is. If you think you need MT Connect in order to keep all your machines working all the time, then that is completely misguided.

I suggest instead you read The Goal and put some thought into which machines need to be fully utilized. Spoiler: it's only a few of the many.

Which leads me to an encouraging thought: you don't need to connect all your machines in order to get value from MT Connect. You don't need a massive investment in Adapter installation and IT infrastructure. You could instead find your bottleneck resource(s) and monitor those to start correlating downtime with its root causes. Then you can fix the root causes and increase throughput without worrying about the 97% (made up statistic) of machines where it doesn't matter if they're working 100% of the time.

So the question I have now is what would you use to monitor bottleneck machines with MT Connect? Would it be as simple as a lamp for each machine that matters? Really, it could just be a smartphone app that shows a list of machines and flashes red for problems. Ideally it would route alerts to the right people automatically and keep some statistics on performance over time.

If no one beats me to it, maybe I'll build the app. As an aside, it would probably be easy to build using Firebase, which is excellent.

In conclusion, read The Goal and Player Piano and you'll be better off than you were.