FABTECH Reporter’s Notebook: ‘Focus on productivity, not production’ in manufacturing

Jon Sobel, CEO and founder of Sight Machine, spoke of data, Industry 4.0, and baseball.

So many in metal fabrication hear Industry 4.0 and think, “OK, that sounds nice, but what is it, exactly, and how can it make my life easier?”

During his talk at FABTECH yesterday, Jon Sobel, CEO and founder of Sight Machine, a plant data and analytics firm, gave one of the best descriptions I’ve heard yet. He talked about Moneyball, the Michael Lewis bestseller and movie that told the story of how statisticians turned a struggling baseball team into champions.

After about 100 years of playing the game the same way,” Sobel said, “some creative folks turned to statistical thinking that had been around for years, and completely reconceived how to think about baseball.”

Until the 1990s, baseball’s powers that be focused on the quality of individual players, including their RBIs and batting averages. Instead of focusing on batting averages, the statistical minds in Moneyball focused on how often a batter got on a base. The more batters that got on base, the greater chance that team had of winning a game. The act of getting on base, Sobel said, is analogous to a unit of production, and the statisticians focused on assembling a team that could produce these units as efficiently as possible.

In the metal fabrication world, an incredibly productive machine or system—a ultrahigh-powered fiber laser, a comprehensive flexible manufacturing system, a new robotic welding line, or whatever else—is like a batter with an incredible batting average. They’re amazing individually, but how do they work together with every other node of production on the shop floor?

“It’s not about how much stuff we make anymore,” he said. “It’s about how well we make it. Do you use the least amount of energy, and are we driving down costs?

”Knowing all this doesn’t come easy,” Sobel continued, adding that it usually involves tying different systems and machines, some old and some new, as well as umpteen different software systems implemented over decades.

But when everything ties together, great things can happen. Back to the Moneyball metaphor, a team with batters who get on base most frequently can equate to nodes of production—be it in cutting, bending, or welding—that together get more products “on base” (that is, the product ships out the door) in less time.

Sobel described this as differentiating between “productivity” and “production.” Production simply measures volume—more tons of metal being processed in the shop, regardless of customer needs or demands. Productivity, on the other hand, is a company becoming more efficient in satisfying customer demand. From raw stock to the shipping dock, every piece of metal is exactly where it needs to be to satisfy or surpass customer expectations.

“Always bring it back to productivity,” he said. “Not production. Productivity.”