Digital manufacturing SaaS ThinkIQ has improved shop floor visibility in its Vision platform, reducing manufacturing blind spots and boosting its continuous supply chain intelligence features.

The company argues achieving greater shop floor visibility requires more than data from smart equipment, as this leaves over 80 percent of manufacturing processes uncovered in most production environments.

ThinkIQ Vision incorporates vision-processing software combined with pre-packaged Machine Learning capabilities to turn cameras on the shop floor into sensors that can eliminate blind spots across equipment, materials and people to enhance the available data for what ThinkIQ describes as “Continuous Intelligence”.

The latest version of ThinkIQ Vision now has out-of-the-box abilities to detect and digitise dozens of common manufacturing events including: vehicle activities in receiving and shipping; material movements and presence; detecting unknown people and tracking their activities; machine state and physical events; safety violations; and values from legacy analogue and disconnected digital displays.

ThinkIQ has also introduced edge hardware including cameras, sensors, wireless networking, an edge computer, and cellular back-haul equipment. This is to allow for more rapid deployment and requiring less effort from the customer.  When using the cellular option, the solution is effectively air-gapped from the customer network to improve network security.

“Many manufacturers are still effectively blind to a staggering percentage of events on the factory floor. With these latest enhancements, we’re eliminating their blind spots and giving them the full picture by measuring machines for utilisation, materials and products for status, and people for efficiency,” said Doug Lawson, CEO of ThinkIQ. “We’re constantly adding new detection and visibility capabilities to give manufacturers more context and meaning to their data.”