Sensor Topic: If You Cannot Measure It, You Cannot Improve It

This title is often attributed to Lord Kelvin who indeed said: "when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." Lord Kelvin's old quote is still very relevant for the manufacturing industries. In the era of digitalization and data analytics, the data itself is often overlooked. More specifically, little attention is given to understanding from a control and optimization perspective what data (measurements) are relevant and expedient to accomplish the manufacturer'™s goals of profit, safety and sustainability. In this session we will share several perspectives of various data consumers (control engineers, production engineers, statisticians, analytical scientists, et al) and pose the question, What data do we need to achieve our goals in manufacturing?