December's Manufacturing Productivity Bulletin

Welcome to December's Manufacturing Productivity Bulletin. 

December is here. Another year of spindles turning, lasers cutting, mills milling and production lines running and unexpected downtimes occurring when you least want them will soon draw to a close, for this year at least! 

With this being our final newsletter of the year, our CEO, Chris, wanted to share a few words with you. But before we get to that, here's what's in this month's email.  

In November, we caught up with the Operations Director at Westley Plastics, a leading 200-year-old cast nylon and plastic components manufacturer who shared his story about how they have embraced smart technology in their factory to gain efficiency. We include a brief update on FourJaw 2.1 and the beta release and give you the opportunity to complete a survey about our upcoming Energy Monitoring capability, finally, we've included a roundup of our key takeaways from November's Advanced Engineering and Smart Factory Expo.  

A few words from our CEO, Chris

As we head towards the end of the year I want to pass my thanks to all our customers who have supported us and thought it timely to share some of the highlights that stand out to me from this past year. 

What A Year 2022 Has Been For FourJaw

We started the year as a team of nine in a small (some may say 'compact') sublet office with a rapidly developing product and a growing list of customers.

Now we are reaching the end of the year the team has doubled to 18, and we have grown our customer base significantly, with FourJaw driving productivity for manufacturers across the UK, Northern Europe and New Zealand. We've moved into a new home, won a couple of industry awards, been shortlisted for several and advanced significantly across every area of the business to make our customer offering even stronger.

2022 has seen a massive transformation in our product offering. In the summer, we launched Version 2.0, delivering a step-change improvement to the layout, user experience and overall functionality of FourJaw. It has been great to receive such positive feedback from our customer base.

Since then we have been working hard on 2.1 which we are excited to launch in Q1 2023, which again features massive improvements across the platform, some of the highlights are that:

2.1 delivers real-time, accurate Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) on any machine that we monitor, regardless of age, type or brand! We believe OEE is the key metric that many manufacturers need to get a complete picture of factory performance, but up until now, they have had no way of tracking it in real time, accurately, and on any machine. The FourJaw tech magicians have found a way and we’re excited to include it in the 2.1 release!

2.1 revolutionises the machine operators’ experience of FourJaw. Operators are constantly under pressure to deliver, and with external challenges such as increasing raw material costs and skyrocketing energy costs, these pressures aren’t going away. Yet there are lots of internal challenges that stop operators from hitting their production targets, things that your production team can do to help them. Version 2.1 is transformative as it provides operators with the visibility, communication, and digital tools they need to achieve their goals!

As a team, we are very proud of how far things have come in such a short period and we couldn't have done it without our customers’ confidence in our product and team.

We have big plans for 2023 and I can’t wait to see how far things will have progressed by this time next year.

We are wishing you all a productive Christmas period and a Happy New Year!

Chris

200-year-old manufacturer turns to smart technology to drive efficiency

This month, Westley Plastics a leading cast nylon and plastic components manufacturer shares the challenges they faced on the shop floor and how FourJaw enabled them to gain efficiencies across their manufacturing processes. Read the full article here.

An air of optimism among manufacturers at industry events

As manufacturers face inflationary pressures, supply chain issues, and rising material and labour costs, it was evident at all the shows we attended that the appetite to adopt plug-and-play, smart technology, such as machine monitoring software is high up on the agenda.

From Advanced Engineering to Smart Factory Expo - in the last month we have spoken to so many manufacturers who were actively seeking solutions to enable them to drive productivity and factory efficiency, here's what we learnt. 

How important is energy monitoring to your factory?

We're on a mission to build the best productivity and efficiency software available for manufacturers. To help make sure we develop the features you want the most, we're looking for your feedback to see if an energy monitoring' feature within FourJaw would be valuable to you. Have your say and complete this short survey.

Thanks and Happy Manufacturing,

 The FourJaw Manufacturing Analytics Team