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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.