Posted by George Dalle Ave on Wed, May 19, 2010
I had the honour of being invited to speak at the PSSMA (The Paper Shipping Sack Manufacturers Association) meeting in Nashville this month. Dick Storat and Roger Boos put on a great event, especially given the difficult times that Nashville endured with the high water levels. The Cumberland River, which flows through Nashville, apparently rose an amazing 61 feet - that's about five stories. Flying into Nashville, it broke my heart seeing only roof tops in the middle of the spreading river. Parts of downtown Nashville were without power and flooded, including the Ryman Theatre. Despite this hardship, the people of Nashville welcomed us and put up a brave face. And the music was as good as I imagined it would be. The people of Nashville are extraordinary.
At the conference itself, it was a full house with companies from the Multiwall bag industry and their suppliers attending. We met terrific people at the highest levels of these companies that were honest, forthcoming and wonderfully candid. We learned a lot in just talking to them and hopefully they picked up one or two things from us.
Dick put together a fantastic line up of presenters. Dick himself provided great presentations on the US Economic Conditions and also delivered an update on the Multiwall Industry. Like all industries, the Multiwall Industry has had its challenges but appears to have turned the corner and is poised for further improvement. Bob Cantu gave an eye opening presentation on how to achieve an AIB Superior rating, while Sam Sirois of Circadian Technologies taught us about managing fatigue in shift operations. I finally understand why an espresso is important to me at 11:00 AM and why I am dead tired at 10:30 PM while being wide awake at 11:00 PM. Who knew?
As for me, I presented our view of Shopfloor Automation and Rapid Time to Value in our presentation, "Bringing Machine Truth to the Organization". While at the conference, we talked with Greif, a long standing member, who again reiterated reaching that "ah-ha moment" after automating their data collection procedures in their Omaha Nebraska plant ultimately eliminating 112 hours of downtime per month.
In the upcoming articles I'll work through some of the key themes of my Shopfloor Automation presentation. I am looking forward to establishing an ongoing dialog.
If you are contemplating joining the PSSMA but are not sure, take my advice and just do it. Dick and Roger put on a great show and you will meet terrific people who have deep knowledge of the industry. The PSSMA is definitely working toward making the entire industry better.
And please make your way to Nashville to enjoy the great music and the great barbecue. It is an amazing city with great people that deserves our support.
Posted by Alex Miggiani on Wed, Apr 14, 2010
Pennsylvania is a great state. There are interesting things in the west and interesting things in the east - and in the middle - the Amish. When I was told we were planning a trip to PA where the customer planned to utilize their HMI input rather than implementing barcode scanners for the collection of machine operator feedback, I immediately thought, oh no - a sales guy promise that will lead to more engineering work!
Background Story:
A manufacturing software and hardware system was installed to track the mixer utilization and accurately report all different parts of the batch process including loading, blending, pack out and cleaning. All of these measurements are used to report efficiencies and pinpoint processing time losses.
Pharmaceutical companies have strict guidelines governing new process equipment or changes to the process. Each time a change is made, the process and equipment must be revalidated to FDA guidelines. To avoid the need to revalidate, our equipment was installed outside of the processing room and considered monitoring equipment only, which does not affect the process at all.
Our most successful customers utilize a barcode scanner to gain valuable operator input for ‘idle periods' and ‘below rate' situations. However, these operators were accustomed to using the HMI to control the machine and they had concerns regarding wiring and power for a handheld barcode scanner.
Instead of implementing the scanners, we set up the system such that it solely communicates with the PLC. All signals, inputs, and batch information are driven through the HMI without the need for a barcode scanner. The operators have a touch screen menu they use to select different downtime reason codes. They can also select batch information that is passed through to the manufacturing system.
The system was installed and validated in less than 2 hours. The only wires required were power and network. Everything comes through the PLC / HMI including the valuable operator input. The image shows the HMI screen that was created for the operators.
Now, don't get me wrong - I love the scanners. They are simple, reliable, look great and feel good in your hands - happiness is a warm scanner. But you know what? The HMI input works. And it works well. I hate to admit it but that sales guy was actually right.
Now I hope I don't get stuck behind a horse and buggy on my drive through Amish country...I have a whole bunch more installs to get to.
Posted by Alex Miggiani on Tue, Mar 30, 2010
How do you track the utilization of your blending tanks?
In most cases you probably don't track product utilization - or you rely on the operator to manually record product run times and quantities. In fact, most companies have no idea how many gallons of product are flushed down the drain during a changeover. What you do know is that there is a tremendous amount of unaccounted for product at the end of the week / month / quarter etc.
Understanding the real flow of product into and out of tanks and the amount of product consumed during a changeover has been eye opening for one customer in the contract packaging space.
Most contract packagers bring product in bulk which is stored on site in tanks. This is then blended to a recipe and pumped to the packaging lines. The amount of product is estimated based on the order size and expected losses. These losses include over runs and rework - but most losses can be attributed to the large amount of material remaining in the piping after a job is complete.
A manufacturing performance management system - Plantnode, was installed to track the tank utilization and accurately report product consumption, additive addition, blending, filling, draining, along with process related downtime. All of these measurements are used to report efficiencies and point out losses related to different jobs.
With their data collection now completely automated, this customer is setting aggressive new efficiency benchmarks in their operations. Blend tanks are now measured for efficiencies and there is no longer any finger pointing at the end of the month when it's time to account for the delta between product in and product out. Real standards are being developed with real data and jobs/batches are looked at in a different light to determine if they actually make money.
By the way this blend tank is pushing 20 years old and the only way to connect to it is via a serial cable to the weight scale. There is no PLC or automation. Aside from the weight scale the tank controls are all manual and pneumatic.
Posted by Alex Miggiani on Wed, Mar 03, 2010
The manual way? Good Luck - that is as useful as snow in Dallas!
Speaking of snow in Dallas, I'm still in the Dallas airport after an installation at a leading fresh vegetable packaging company where we solved their manual metal detector data collection issues.
All food industry companies have metal detectors on all of their lines. Most are required by their customers to log all metal detection instances and QA testing. Most do it manually. Our customer had a need to more accurately track their metal detection to offer their customers a higher level of QA checks.
A real-time performance system was installed to track the occurrences, duration, and reasons for ALL metal detector instances. This system also tracks uptime, production, and efficiencies.
With the automated tracking of ALL metal detector occurrences the customer can get a better handle on quality and showcase the data to their customers. The reports track every metal detector occurrence and the associated reason. The reporting shows the chronological distribution of each occurrence and a pareto chart of occurrences vs. reasons. This data is stored in online reports for 2 years.
Now my only problem is getting home from Dallas when there's 6 inches of snow on the ground. Only two de-icing trucks for one of the largest airport in the US. I'm gonna be here for a while...
Posted by Ashok Sivanand on Wed, Feb 24, 2010
I finally picked up a copy of Freakonomics, from the series by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The economist-journalist combo manage to objectively derive using statistical evidence, conclusions to debatable subjects. Examples include the effect of good parenting on education and how sumo wrestlers and teachers both cheat. Their most noted finding is perhaps how they correlate the decline in crime rates in 1992 to the legalization of abortion in 1973.
My biggest take-away from the book would be that interesting (and not otherwise obvious) questions can be asked regarding a subject (and answered) if one has access to a comprehensive data set on that subject.
Sadly, very few production managers or continuous improvement champions in the manufacturing industry today have an accurate, comprehensive data-set with which they can ask similar questions pertaining to their manufacturing floor. This could handicap their continuous improvement efforts when they are invested in the wrong places and not utilized to their full potential. Imagine Superman trying to save Metropolis without X-Ray vision.
Real time performance management systems have given manufacturers Superhero-like insight by accurately highlighting and quantifying opportunities for improving performance on their shop floor. This not only allows them to minimize losses by responding to problems immediately but also provides a reliable, accurate data-set which they can analyze like Levitt and Dubner have: Manu-freakonomics.
Watch this space for stories on how a bakery solved a mystery regarding a seemingly profitable product and how a food packaging company cut changeover times in half.
Posted by Tony Singh on Fri, Jan 29, 2010
One of the greatest benefits of my job is the opportunity to be in front of the customer the very first time they look at the Plantnode reports. It's the expressions on their faces - sometimes shock, sometimes concern - but mostly amazement. Before implementing some type of performance monitoring solution it is not uncommon for folks to think they're running as efficiently as possible, more so, that they're running a tight ship. They may have some downtime periodically but the assumption is they are already at the limits of their production capacity...
...then they see the Machine Status report.
Imagine you have the tools to monitor daily production on a minute to minute basis. You can see how often your assets are running and how often they're not. You are able to respond to issues immediately, as they occur. If you could see how much downtime truly occurs in a full day and how much it greatly affects your productivity, all in real-time, you'd be amazed. Maybe the issue is start up time, maybe it's break time creep, or maybe it's maintenance response time. Whatever the case, a few minutes of lost time over the course of a full day can certainly add up. How much money could you potentially save, or how much more production could you gain in a week, a month, or even a year?
To answer that question I need to share an experience I recently had with a well known pharmaceutical company. A month after Plantnode was installed, I had the opportunity to present the monitoring results for two tablet-packaging machines.
Now - this customer was aware they had inefficiencies in their process, but despite a looming recession they were still running at what they considered full capacity. I distinctly remember their faces when they saw all the idle time. It didn't make sense to them. How could they be running at capacity when they were struggling with at least ten to twelve minutes of downtime an hour? Some hours their machines hadn't run at all - what exactly constitutes "capacity" at that point? Comparing the Machine Status and Production reports our customer could clearly see how all that idle machine time directly affected their output and how overlooking "a little bit of downtime" could quickly turn into huge losses in productivity.
Plantnode provides insight. It gives our customers the ability to really see where their inefficiencies lie and how greatly these inefficiencies impact their business. In this case the customer realized exactly how much time and production they were losing and when exactly it was occurring, down to the very minute. While the initial reaction may have been complete surprise, the results of this business case were even more startling - if the customer could eliminate just 15 minutes of downtime per shift this translated to a benefit of approximately $33K in just one month. And that is just a 3% improvement in efficiency!
If you had the opportunity to gain that much insight into your process, how much would you benefit?
Posted by Ash Sivanand on Thu, Jan 28, 2010
Heard from a buddy last week who works at an automotive supplier with whom I have worked closely. They've finally put an end to the age old epic battle between the operations staff and maintenance staff.
Whenever management tried to minimize downtime losses from machine breakdowns they brick-walled. They did not know where their best opportunities for downtime improvement could be found - maintenance requests, maintenance response, actual maintenance time or operator response time?
Of course asking either group led to finger pointing and situation-exacerbation.
Then they implemented maintenance barcode scanning on their Shoplogix system to track various losses during a machine breakdown... response times were down drastically by the NEXT DAY! (Interesting, the effect of a little accountability). With nobody hiding behind the data (or lack thereof), the operators and maintenance staff now get along better, and management know where to dedicate their improvement efforts. Huzzah!
Looking forward to a wedding at Jay Peak this weekend.. Also have some unfinished business with a glade-trail by the name of Timbuktu..
Sadly, not all epic battles are resolved by barcode scanners...
Posted by Tracy Robertson on Fri, Jan 08, 2010
Mistake proofing, or poke yoke, is commonly known as a technique for ensuring an assembly process is done in the correct manner however there are other "mistakes" that happen on the shop floor with equally serious consequences.
Over production, below-rate run speed, prolonged setup times, material-handling delays, etc. are mistakes that cost a manufacturing organization time and money.
Engaging your employees through the provision of real time machine truth data drives change in the correct direction and shines the light on the real issues impacting performance and profitability, e.g. Downtime, Idle, Setup.
TAKE THE BLINKERS OFF.
Posted by Tracy Robertson on Tue, Oct 20, 2009
Variance analysis has been a staple of the accounting world for decades. Actual to budget analysis is how all organizations get to a bottom line assessment of performance. Usually this occurs at month end, after the books are closed. Actual to Standard Costs are analyzed to understand how well manufacturing performed, often at the end of a job, the end of a shift or sometimes not until the end of a month. Armed with variances, organizations typically drilled into what went wrong and put processes into place to make sure the same mistakes did not reoccur. There are inherant problems with this approach.
First is the lack of detail captured related to the causes of the variance. Second is the timeliness of the information. In a manufacturing plant after the fact data is good for visibility into how to improve a process but does nothing to help increase productivity and profitability while the job is still on the shop floor.
Getting to the root cause
Manufacturing variance analysis has dealt with data from a costing viewpoint inside of the framework of an ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning, application. Inside of any ERP application the focus is not on determining the root cause for a failure on the shop floor. It is on recording the correct distribution of effort and costs to provide accurate financial information. ERP systems do not record why something went wrong, just that more labor, more machinery time or more materials were used. These overages are compared to standard and variances calculated for booking into the General Ledger.
At no time are the real problems examined. There is no way in ERP to record speed loss, when a machine is slowing down but not stopping. ERP can't differentiate between a stoppage from a tool break versus a stoppage from a tool not being part of the set up package delivered to the work station. This inability to capture the root cause of down time limits the real impact of traditional manufacturing variance analysis. If variance analysis does not make the root cause visible how will manufacturers progress?
Real-time visibility
The second issue of timeliness is just as critical. Manufacturers have one chance to get things right, when the work is in process. What operators, supervisors and plant management needs is visibility when work is starting to trend towards a variance while it is on a machine. This is the only time that the human capital in the plant can be effectively deployed to preserve productivity and profitability of work.
As organizations work to trim costs, reduce the cost of quotations, they need to rely on the fact that while the job is running, or when the plant is an hour into a shift, the managers can have visibility into the current trends. Are we running to spec or quoted time for a particular job? Where do we need to refocus our efforts? In today's economy, most organizations, if given the right level of visibility, will make the correct decisions.
Variance analysis has proven a useful tool for accountants to analyze past performance but in order to be an effective manufacturing weapon it must be deployed as a real time barometer of potential problems on the shop floor.
Posted by Tracy Robertson on Fri, Oct 16, 2009
Continuous Improvement Series - Part 5 of 5
As organizations evolve through their implementation of Continuous Improvement (CI) Programs they work to create a culture of change. The approach to change is really geared to elimination of waste in the facility and process. How to do things better than we are today is the main focus of a change oriented culture.
In many CI programs initial changes involve physical adjustments to machines or changes to the layout of the plant. These are significant changes that consume time and resources. As processes mature and benefits are realized organizations start to look at operations to uncover the next level of waste.
Building on the tools described in this series of blogs gives organizations a step up in their search for better management tools. First, those tools provide an effective way to monitor the success of initial CI projects on an ongoing basis. An Accurate Data foundation combined with Alerts will ensure that plant performance does not regress. Changes brought about through CI initiatives can be complimented by monitoring systems designed to prevent a recurrence of waste.
The key is setting the next set of targets. Once large changes are completed it is then time to examine and prioritize the small changes. Once again the foundation of Accurate Data yields the insights necessary to set and prioritize targets.
Real time machine data will yield detailed information on stoppages that occur during the course of the day. Associating these stoppages with root causes and providing a downtime analytical framework will point to the next set of problems that are in the way of improved productivity.
Organizations can then select targets and use tools designed to make these visible throughout the organization. LED Board technology can focus attention throughout the plant ensuring the right employees are engaged in resolving the problems. As these problems are resolved Alerts can be created so that the systems automatically monitor the production process and report when tolerances are starting to slip.
The next series of improvements can then be implemented using the same approach. In this way focus is brought to bear on problems that show potential for impact to the organiztion while systems monitor processes to ensure there are no relapses.
It is the combination of incremental change, applied continuously using a foundation of Accurate Data that can yield truly sustainable CI programs.