Cody Bann, director of engineering at SmartSights, talked about some of the trends he’s observed at Automation Fair 2023 in Boston as well as the company’s plans for their future and what the future of smart manufacturing looks like.
SmartSights, which was known as WIN-911 until recently, is going through many changes at once as they help old customers adjust to the changes they’ve implemented while positioning themselves toward the future and keeping brand awareness high when it comes to their old products.
“Getting them under the SmartSights umbrella and getting people familiar with that brand is certainly still very fresh and something we’re working on and getting that out there has been a major theme for this show and every show we’ve done this year,” he said.
He said they’ve also been working on letting customers and users know about their improved integration for XL Reporter and help users, particularly with alarm management, focus on specific alarms they want to be alerted to rather than be subjected to a cacophony of alerts all day, which can cause user fatigue and maybe miss the alarms they should be focused on because they don’t know which ones matter compared to others.
“Alarm management, we feel like we can bring a lot there on just helping you focus the most important alarms and help you drive your alarm process to be based around what’s important.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) was another major theme at Automation Fair and Bann believed it is very important, but it needs the right context to be successful by using analytics as a driving force to give customers the right information they need.
“We are sitting on a wealth of customer information in terms of customer processes and we’ve got customers in every vertical. All of that presents unique use cases and take real-time data and that historical data and now that we’ve linked that up to the cloud, there’s certainly more potential to do more with that data and leverage it for our end users.”
As for the future, Bann said, “What I see is being able to tap into virtually everything that’s at the network layer and drive that upward to create real solutions for customers.”
