Article by William Glasson, National Sales Manager, Genetec
Deploying unified physical security technology can help manufacturers minimise expensive downtime.
Is your manufacturing business finding it as hard as it’s ever been to maintain margins and profits? For many local players, the answer is, unfortunately, a resounding ‘yes’. That it’s a difficult time to be in business is not in dispute and Australian manufacturers are doing it particularly tough. In recent times, inflation has seen the cost of inputs rise across the board. Labour has never been more expensive.
Meanwhile, the global fuel shock triggered by the Middle East war has sent energy prices soaring and that’s had a significant impact on production and logistics costs.
Throw in the cash flow crunch caused by Payday Super and you’re looking at a seriously challenging set of economic conditions.
Striving to stay afloat
Against this backdrop, numerous once profitable businesses have found it impossible to stay afloat. Manufacturers that don’t want to share their fate need to stay focused on containing costs on all fronts. That means strengthening financial management, maintaining tight inventory control and ensuring operations, in the back office and on the shopfloor, are streamlined, efficient and resilient.
Minimising unplanned downtime on the lines is critical. Irrespective of whether it’s caused by equipment failure, process disruption, a safety incident, a security event or something else, it’s expensive and disruptive.
Ceasing production for even a few hours can potentially throw schedules and delivery dates into disarray and make a dent in profitability for the month or quarter.
A business that experiences downtime regularly runs the risk of damaging customer relationships and seeing itself written off as an unreliable supplier.
Having a bird’s eye view of operations
That’s why understanding what’s happening across your manufacturing facility around the clock is vital.
That includes knowing what time materials are arriving at the dock and when deliveries are dispatched, which external contractors you have on site, who’s entered restricted areas and how machine operators are responding to changing conditions in real time.
Knowledge is power and having that sort of granular data at your fingertips enables you to respond faster and more effectively when production problems arise.
It’s the key to remedying issues rapidly and preventing them occurring in the first place.
If you’ve digitised your production process, some useful intelligence will likely be captured by the specialist systems you’ve deployed. It’s unlikely, however, that that intelligence will be aggregated into a single view of operations. Having it dispersed across multiple data siloes can make it tricky to piece together what’s happened when an incident has occurred.
Maintaining visibility over the production process
That’s where unified physical security technology comes into its own.
The term refers to an ecosystem of automated security products that can be consolidated to allow them to operate as a single unit. The Australian average manufacturer has some of the requisite building blocks in place already – think camera arrays, video analytics, licence plate recognition and alert systems that minimise risk and support OHS compliance.
Establishing a security operations centre to centralise the capability of these systems can deliver a two-fold benefit.
It affords more rigorous protection for assets and employees and it’s a means by which businesses can maintain that common operating picture.
When video surveillance, access control, intrusion detection, communications and building automation systems and other operational technologies work together, operators and management can gain a much clearer understanding of outages as they’re unfolding.
Having that context means technical specialists don’t need to waste valuable time working through incorrect assumptions about what may have gone awry. With enhanced insight into what’s occurred, they can concentrate their efforts on fixing whatever’s gone wrong fast.
Putting your manufacturing business on more secure footing in 2027 and beyond
Operating as efficiently and cost effectively as possible is an urgent imperative for local manufacturers that want to remain viable long term. Deploying unified security technology makes it possible to reduce expensive downtime by boosting your visibility of operations on the factory floor. If improving productivity and profitability is your aim, it’s an investment well worth your consideration.
This article contains information provided by the author and is intended for general use only. It does not take into account your personal, professional, or business circumstances.
