As the manufacturing sector continues to recover, the focus of operations is changing. The economic upturn has brought an end to low volume and harsh rationalisation. Volume has suddenly shot up for many manufacturers, and now they face a problem much different from cost cutting, ie: how to meet increasing demand after a long period of resource slashing and little or no investment in productivity?

Historically, businesses did one of two things to meet new demand: build capacity with capital investment or outsource. But there is a third option that is far less cost-prohibitive and more sustainable: meet demand with better utilisation of assets on hand.

This involves eliminating loss — random and chronic — to free up resources and capacity. To do this, manufacturers need accurate, real-time manufacturing information so they can uncover and prioritise production problems and create new capacity using the same resources they already have.

Boosting Capacity

A recent Epicor whitepaper lays out a four-step process to boost capacity:

• Stop unplanned and operational downtime. In a world where reliability is key and unplanned downtime can cost thousands of dollars per minute, reducing unplanned and operational downtime can yield great results.
  
  In addition to financial savings, reducing changeover time and operational downtime leads to proportional increases in manufacturing capacity. Best practices implemented on a single line can often be transferred to similar lines, multiplying the impact and creating even more needed capacity.
  
  
• Wipe out minor stops. Minor stops are short hesitations and stops that are usually less than five minutes. They are short enough to be ‘unnoticed’, but long enough to have a significant impact on line performance and capacity. Minor stops can add up to significant loss, especially if you do not have visibility into the frequency, duration, and reasons for them.
  
  
• Eliminate production variability and quality loss. Quality loss and rejected product has a double impact: material and labour. A standard Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) calculation includes a production reject as a lost opportunity for production, which impacts capacity. Therefore, when calculating OEE, consider the cost of both material and labour.
  
  
• Establish improvement priorities in a financial context. Not all downtime is equal. Applying cost information to downtime analysis may reveal a new perspective: the cost of downtime. A cost-of-downtime analysis can be used to establish priorities with a financial context. Moreover, a probability of success analysis across loss categories will prepare operations professionals to prioritise efforts and achieve sustainable improvements.
  
  

Capping Inefficiency With MES

This can be further illustrated by manufacturers such as Australia’s Caps & Closures — a company that utilise technology to enhance the four-step process.

The company has grown fairly quickly over the past few years and now deals with global markets. They understood that in order to handle the expansion, a centralised solution was required to review and obtain information such as variations in cycle times and scrap rates in real-time. As such, the company decided to implement the Mattec MES (Manufacturing Execution System).

The solution collects production data directly from equipment and allows operators on the shop floor to enter other data using touch screen technology in real-time, eliminating inaccurate and time-consuming manual data collection.

With real-time information and alerts, the system helped the manufacturer pinpoint critical issues, reduce waste and improve quality and customer services.

“Our injection moulders and assembly machines are connected to the system which then records each pulse from each machine measuring cycle time, calculating the number of units produced, downtime and OEE. From a planting point of view, the solution is critical to ensure that we meet our customers’ lead time expectations and provide that extra level of service,” said Robert McArthur, GM of Caps & Closures.

He also commented that the deployment of the system has also helped to plan their jobs better, minimise tool changes and run jobs for longer periods.

Much more than OEE, MES also helps with real strategies for improvement. It can be used to reduce waste, inventory and downtime in order to optimise equipment, capital and worker resources. At the end of the day, MES drives performance.

Injecting A New Monitoring Solution

But what if you already have a production monitoring system in place? Stop there for a moment, it might be worthwhile to reevaluate if the solution is reaping the benefits that it should and not impeding your production process.

Some pitfalls that a traditional production monitoring system can bring include insufficient reaction to machine downtime, no integration with existing ERP system, limited real-time reporting capabilities and limited network accessibility which resulted in limited availability to users to key in data.

These weaknesses were the driving force behind a global injection moulding company’s search for a new production and process monitoring solution.

“We were concerned about the vendor’s sustainability, given the size of the existing user base and the number of new users they were bringing in,” says Steve Boeder, director of operations at the Vollrath Dane Facility.

“That seemed to impact product enhancements because they had become few and far between. We also had no process monitoring capability. We had paid for that module as part of an upgrade, but we just couldn’t get the functionality to work.”

As such, Vollrath concluded that the new production monitoring system has to fulfill the following criteria :

• Real-time processing alerts
• Comprehensive Statistical Process Control (SPC)
• A quality system module
• Easy-to-use Machine Interface Units (MIUs) for the employees on the floor.

Upon much evaluation, they decided to choose Mattec MES as the solution fulfills the above requirements. The system provides them with real-time production monitoring to capture downtime reasons, reject reasons and reject quantities. Real-time reporting is available to users on the network, improving accessibility to key information.

The greatest influence on improved uptime at the company has been the use of the alerting and voice paging system of the MES.

“We use manual alerts for paging the necessary resources, like maintenance staff, quality staff, supervisors and first responders to a machine. We also have automatic alerts based on cycle times. If the MES finds that a machine is running out of cycle, these key alerts let the technicians know that something needs to be changed.

The voice paging and alerting system has had the most impact on our ability to improve uptime,” says Mr Boeder. “Prior to the software installation, our uptime (of our planned run time) was at 79 percent. As we implemented and rolled out the MES in the middle of the year, it rose to about 81 percent. By the next year that number was 90 percent. This year-to-date we’re averaging 91 percent uptime. That’s just from the alerting capability, which allows us to get the right personnel over to the affected machine immediately.”

By minimising down machine response times through the real-time voice paging and alerting functionality of the MES, the company has steadily improved OEE to 87 percent, and uptime to 91 percent. Real-time reporting has improved accessibility to key information to the people who need it.

To sum it up, the best way to create capacity is to scrutinise line performance with manufacturing intelligence applications that monitor and analyse manufacturing processes accurately, and in real time. These applications provide crucial information to help find the capacity needed, without costly investments for new machinery, additional labour, or contract manufacturing.