The unifying of technologies that have become widely adopted in corporate IT are now being adapted to manufacturing and the playing field is changing. The merging of technologies are resulting in improved plant-floor operations, efficiencies and effectiveness, while bolstering up-time, production flexibility and improved decision making based on data mining. These technologies include: Ethernet/IP Networking, Virtualization, Collaboration and Business Intelligence.
REDUCED MATERIAL LOSS & SCRAP RATE
Business Issue(s)
The client's processes and methods of managing uncured and incomplete product awaiting final assembly were resulting in excessive waste. Product was placed on skids and moved to a storage area. From the storage area, there was no intelligence provided to the fork-lift drivers who were responsible to pick product from storage and deliver to finishing. Over time, the uncured and incomplete product would degrade, resulting in spoiled, defective product that would be scrapped. The material loss was in double digits, and inventory management costs were huge due to core inefficiencies.
Solution
We designed and implemented a RFID network infrastructure solution that enabled controlled and proactive production management. The solution directed the fork truck drivers to pick materials in the most effective order for finishing.
Results
ROI after the implementation of the project took less than a year. Material loss went from double digits to low single digits.
DOWNTIME REDUCTION & IT INFRASTRUCTURE COST REDUCTION
Business Issue(s)
HMI failures were taking two to four days to replace, causing high production and operational costs. The company had historically added more servers in an attempt to create redundancy and diminish downtime. However, adding servers did not have the direct impact on downtime reduction demanded from production management and had the unwanted side-effect of creating an ever-growing, costly IT infrastructure with an escalating administrative burden.
Solution
We designed and implemented a virtual plant floor environment. This virtual infrastructure replaced the thick-client HMIs with thin-clients, and consolidated the farm of physical servers into high-performance virtualized servers. An online, consolidated administrative console enabled the entire infrastructure to be managed and administered quickly and efficiently by a dramatically smaller technical team.
Results
HMI failures become irrelevant as single points of failure were eradicated. The physical component running production was able to be replaced in minutes, not days. The forty individual servers per plant shrunk to six servers per plant. IT Asset utilization went from 10% to 70%. IT overhead costs were cut 50%.