Manufacturing engineers spend a lot of time crunching numbers to make sure production and efficiency levels remain at their peak. Now, managers at a Houston-based oil equipment company are discovering that words as well as numbers can be used to analyze problems and make the manufacturing process even better. “We are always looking to improve our operations, to get better, to be more efficient,” says Dan Fortune, Global Business Excellence Manager for FMC Technologies Inc. “And we have found that text mining can help us do that in a significant way.” Text mining involves sorting words and phrases into categories based on commonalities. At FMC Technologies, the words come from manufacturing reports. They are coded and then analyzed using JMP statistical discovery softwa

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