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Future Factories

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

On a daily basis, mega factories like those building airplanes and cars deal

with millions of products , being built on the shop floor and being supplied

from their vendors. Even a minor delay is capable of causing a domino effect and

can influence productivity and efficiency. Therefore to stay competitive, lean

manufacturers need their personnel to be equipped with real time visibility on

work-in-process to immediately react to changes and address issues. What is also

required in order to provide better customer service is the need to track the

parts, components, or raw materials that make up the end product without

impacting their operations and increasing their costs.

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Direct Hit!

Applies To: CIOs, IT managers



USP: RFID based WIP solutions


Primary Link: None


Google Keywords: RFID based WIP solutions

Work In Process visibility in Lean Manufacturing



Lean manufacturing or lean production, which is often known simply as 'Lean'

means more value with less work. A variation on the theme of efficiency, Lean

manufacturing is a present-day instance of the larger recurring theme in human

life of increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, and using new innovative

methods to decide what matters, rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing

ideas of what matters. Lean principles come from Japanese manufacturing

industry, mainly from the Toyota Production System. Any Lean manufacturer in

order to realize wasteful use of resources and to create more value for the

customer, needs an in-depth knowledge of various activities on the shop floor.

Therefore, some of the key components of Lean manufacturing are reducing wastes,

smoothening production flows and real time visibility. Let's see what the

current scenario is in the manufacturing space.

Manual processes



Even today, manual entry of job information into a computer or a hand held

device is what most of the current commercially available work-in-process

tracking solutions rely on. Even though more advanced implementations might use

a bar code reader to track work order, job router, employee, parts and work

station. In each case, manual intervention from the employee is required. Manual

process being subject to errors, delays and tampering make the situation of

reduced profitability, speed to market and customer satisfaction inevitable. If

only a single stage of the manufacturing process includes a manual data capture,

the entire process becomes dependent on the accuracy and timeliness of this

step.

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RFID/Barcode

readers without any human intervention send tracking information to backend

systems in real time.

Real time trouble



For analysis and planning, most manufacturers are working on historical or

in the best cases near real time data for analysis and planning purposes.

Therefore, the absence of accurate real time data results in revelation of

problems often after they have occurred. The cost of fixing them goes

exponentially high with the time it requires to identify them.

Lack of integration



Lack of integration and real time data becomes a hurdle when it comes to

applying intelligence to processes and machines. In the past, we have seen

intelligent automation introducing new supervisory functions that analyzed,

identified and also corrected abnormal conditions. But with equipment becoming

more sophisticated and collaborative, real time data needs to be fed in order to

rapidly adapt to new conditions.

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Shop floor tracking



Another major problem in the current shop floor tracking solutions require

significant process changes to integrate the new data capture elements, and

therefore requires expensive changes in the way people and machines work. When

additional training is required it also takes people's attention from the main

production task.

Expensive Shop-Floor to Top-Floor integration



Most of the work-in-process solutions take a top-down approach in solving

the tracking of work orders, people and assets. The Lean manufacturing trend has

had vendors of back end infrastructure such as ERP, MRP, and WMS in the driver

seat. The proposed solutions mostly require the devices and logic at the end to

adapt to the application's architecture. As a result, one major consequence is

lengthy and expensive projects where the majority of investments are spent on

the configuration of the back end infrastructure with little consideration for

the device, data, security and work flow integration as a result fails to

achieve accurate real time data.

Restricted visibility



A smooth production flow is achieved not only throughout the factory but

also in collaboration with suppliers. Manufacturers benefit from reducing wastes

and smoother production but the benefits increase manifolds when the suppliers

follow the same principles to improve their own production.



When applied at the suppliers end as well, it fosters more collaboration and
encourages lean thinking up and down the supply chain.

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Unfortunately, today's work-in-process tracking solutions offer no visibility

outside the four walls of the production environment. Delays, material

shortages, and priorities can not be handled until they become real problems

that need immediate attention or are stopping the production.

Enabling automated real time data capture



Innovations in contactless technologies and solutions like those based on

RFID and Wi-FI has brought reliability and accuracy to the industry and also

have significantly reduced costs of solutions based on these. Pushing new

manufacturing processes through the above mentioned bottlenecks are Radio

Frequency based hardware and software solutions. These do not require line of

site and manual intervention anymore to read information on fast moving objects

or groups of items in large quantity. Apart from acting like a catalyst and

speeding up processes, contactless technologies are making them more reliable

and tamper proof. Also there is a direct positive effect on productivity as

humans focus more on value adding activities instead of repeatable tasks.

Real-time intelligence on the Shop-floor



Achievement of the manufacturer's goals is impossible if this new real time

data capture is handled by the back end infrastructure. This not being something

to do with application performance or network latency can't be solved with

better computing and network resources. It's a fundamental architecture decision

that a few manufacturers are taking. The decision being to distribute processing

where the action is. Processing of data at the edge of the network empowers

employees and managers with real time data and provides them with the ability to

make changes before it's too late.

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Integration of real time supply chain information



Purchase order(PO) and advanced shipping notice(ASN) is what the current

collaboration between suppliers and their manufacturers is limited to. The

supplier starts the production when the PO is received and notifies that the

product is being shipped to its destination through the ASN. Therefore, one of

the largest opportunities for the manufacturing industry to improve productivity

and reduce costs lie in the time between the PO reception and the ASN creation

and the variations that come with it.

Migrating from UPC to EPC/ RFID



Real time information on asset movement without requiring any human

intervention is possible to achieve through EPC/RFID tags. Adding on to it, EPC

tags can carry far more information than conventional barcodes. Therefore,

decoding the EPC tag information in real time with appropriate business

applications can help improve process efficiency, security and quality.

Advantage



At the shop-floor level, integration of EPC tags helps in realizing the real

picture. Without any human intervention, such solutions can provide a real time

analysis of the status of products. An in depth study of the current stage,

reports can be generated giving the plant manager a complete overview.

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