SAN FRANCISCO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — August 5, 2015 — Sight Machine Inc., developer of the leading manufacturing analytics platform, today announced a major upgrade to its platform, adding systematic data conditioning and modeling technologies, powerful new analytical capabilities and automated tools to provision and implement the platform across distributed manufacturing operations.

The new technology takes capabilities Sight Machine developed for early clients and turns them into rapidly deployable tools that attack common client problems in collecting, conditioning and analyzing data. In addition to increasing the speed at which clients can be configured on the Sight Machine platform, the new technology will enable Sight Machine to scale its business faster, by significantly reducing the amount of engineering services each new client requires.

Sight Machine transforms heterogeneous machine, sensor and part data from manufacturing processes into actionable insights, helping manufacturers tackle challenges in quality and performance throughout their operations. The analytics platform operates across individual machines, multiple factories and globally distributed supply chains.

“Sight Machine’s recent innovations continue a paradigm shift for factory technology,” said Adam Taisch, Sight Machine’s VP of Customer Development. “By treating widely distributed manufacturing assets, factory data sources, and even the parts themselves as connected data sources for a modern analytics platform, manufacturers are able to analyze a breadth of data that until now has been impossible to cohere. The analytics engine is the key.”

Manufacturing-Specific Analytics Models Deliver Real Insights Into Quality, Efficiency

While many systems can record and visualize data, only Sight Machine provides the necessary analytics engine underneath – a platform developed solely for manufacturing. At the heart of its product line are Sight Machine’s proprietary manufacturing models. These models are foundational to performing analysis for the most common types of discrete, batch and process manufacturing.

Turning raw data into actionable insight requires four levels of processing, and Sight Machine is the only company able to perform these steps across heterogeneous, multi-vendor factory machinery:

1. Collecting the data from geographically distributed sources

2. Combining disparate data streams into manufacturing models that enable meaningful analysis

3. Conducting the analysis; and

4. Displaying the results in a format that enables understanding and action

For example, to reduce defect rates in a process, Sight Machine can collect unlimited streams of data on variables like ambient temperature, press pressure and conveyor speed, convert them into standard units, bundle and assign the data to specific parts or batches, and determine whether any of these variables statistically correlate with higher defect rates.

“Without this data modeling, all you are getting is graphs of data,” Taisch said. “The modeling allows us to use the data for high-value applications like root cause analysis, statistical process control and predictive maintenance.”

Big Data For The Factory Floor

Sight Machine’s platform now includes tools for automated provisioning of assets, data conditioning and modeling and an extensive set of data applications. Provisioning tools allow for rapid data ingestion from a variety of factory floor sources including machines, databases and other factory software. The company has also pioneered scalable technologies for conditioning, cleansing and modeling factory data. This modeling transforms a large variety of data types into meaningful manufacturing models related to process and quality, across manufacturing verticals.

“Amidst all the hype about Big Data and the Industrial Internet of Things, few companies in the manufacturing space have moved beyond trying to solve data interconnection problems,” said Kurt DeMaagd, Sight Machine’s VP of Analytics. “Experience in multiple industries has enabled us to systematize the process from data capture through display, enabling reliable, sophisticated analytics for our clients.”

Among other innovations, Sight Machine has steadily built out its data acquisition capabilities and now has interfaces that accept nearly all common factory data sources. These include PLCs, sensors and other manufacturing equipment from suppliers like Siemens, Rockwell and Mitsubishi; factory-floor cameras from suppliers including Cognex; bar code readers; industrial robots; existing SQL and ODBC sources; data historians like Kepware servers; OPC data; and factory floor systems like MES and ERP.

“Because of the way manufacturing technology historically evolved, most factory data is locked in a prison,” according to Dennis Hodges, chief information officer of Inteva Products LLC, a global automotive supplier of engineered components and systems. “We’ve selected Sight Machine to free and analyze our data. With cloud, mobile and other core technologies in place, manufacturing is poised to begin using production data strategically.”

About Sight Machine

Sight Machine is the developer of the world’s leading manufacturing analytics platform. Sight Machine transforms machine, sensor and part data into actionable insights, helping manufacturers address critical challenges in quality and operations. Sight Machine provides real-time production, quality and supply chain monitoring; retrospective analysis of product variation and failures; predictive analytics to support process improvement; and benchmarking on the contractor, factory, line and tool levels. For more information, please visit www.sightmachine.com .