DTL Systems have developed a solution to greatly enhance your ability to monitor and control Work-In-Progress (WIP). This simple to use system offers near real-time visibility on the flow of Work Orders between the time the Work Order is created and the time the finished Items arrive at the warehouse. The system is non-invasive and can be implemented in less then 10 days.

Implementation of this solution facilitates better Lead-Time management leading to reduced inventory and a rapid return on investment. Flexible reporting options help to promote a better deployment of personnel.

Millipore Ireland is currently piloting this unique solution in the expectation of driving significant reductions in, Lead-Times and Inventory, and a substantial increase in On Time Shipments. In addition it is anticipated that there will be a reduction in administrative tasks related to the distribution and scheduling of Work Orders.

The Environment:

Manufacturing companies constantly strive to reduce production Lead-Times and Inventory levels. Key Performance Indicators, such as OTS (On Time Shipment) help to gauge how well they are performing. The adage, “You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure” is an essential truth of Operations Management. To improve performance it is essential to monitor how well the company meets its KPI targets.

Depending on the Supply Chain configuration (Make To Order / Make To Stock), Customer Sales Orders and/or Safety Stock Levels can trigger the creation of Work Orders. Work Orders (also referred to as Discrete Jobs or Shop Orders) are instructions to the Shop Floor to manufacture specific quantities of Items in a defined sequence. Planning Departments generate these Work Orders to optimise the balance between Inventory, Work-In-Progress, and On-Time-Shipments. From the time a Work Order (Discrete Job / DJ) is signalled to the Shop Floor, to the time the finished Items arrive in the Warehouse, the Work Order will have passed through many different functional areas. It can often be the case that the actual time spent in production is only small component of the overall product lead-time. Other activities, such as Kitting, Set-up, QA, Sterilisation, Packing, etc., may have a far greater impact on the time it takes to complete a Work Order. Provideam's Shop Floor Execution System helps to expose time “wasted” on non value-added activities.
 

The Planner typically works with an ERP system from a major vendor such as Oracle, SAP, JD Edwards, Microsoft etc. to develop Detailed and Master Production Plans. The Detailed Plans, containing a list of the Work Orders required in the short-term, are issued to the Shop Floor for manufacture. While ERP systems are extremely powerful, they tend not to be used widely on the Shop Floor –due to the unique special requirements of each department the integration can be prohibitively expensive. In consequence, until the finished product arrives at the Finish Goods Warehouse, at which point it will be logged in to the ERP system, Planning / Operations may have very little information about the status of the Work Order. Hence it is difficult to assess the impact of „floating-bottle-necks? in the manufacturing processes.
 

A thorough knowledge of manufacturing processes is essential to ensure an optimal configuration of Work Orders. In a well run plant each department will monitor how well it is performing. However, it is quite common to find a range of different systems in use in each area – from paper-based manual systems to spread-sheets to custom built software applications – all of which have been developed over time and which suit the requirements of each individual area. In this ad-hoc monitoring environment it is very difficult to develop a holistic, coherent assessment of how the plant is performing. In addition there are issues of data integrity and data redundancy which need to be considered.
 

The Objective:

Our goal was to develop a solution, suitable for use on the Shop Floor, which would be an essential tool both for Planning and Operations. Operations personnel with experience of ERP implementation will know that it can be a difficult, time consuming and expensive undertaking – with no guarantee of ultimate success. With this in mind we have develop a solution which is;

• Easy to install (less then 10days)
• Easy to deploy (less than 1 day), and
• Easy to use (intuitive).

The solution is practically non-invasive with minimal interaction of Shop Floor personnel. Through the use of Bar Code Scanning we enable, in a very simple way, the Shop Floor Operator to timestamp each Work Order as it passes through the key staging points in the manufacturing process.

The solution offers a simple status view of all the active Work Orders. In this way the Production Supervisor has a quick and easy method of finding the relevant details on active Work Orders, while at the same time providing an in depth insight into the movement of Work Orders through the manufacturing environment – both on average and in real-time.

Flexible, ad-hoc, reporting, with drill-down capabilities, on Lead-Times and Outstanding Jobs is also included.

The Solution:

Our solution was achieved by providing a central data resource with an easy to use interface which tracks the flow of Work Orders from Planning through the various phases of production and quality inspection. This central data resource provides near real-time visibility of the status of each Work Order and can be available to any authorised user from Planning, Production, Quality, Operations etc. Provideam is a highly secure system. Only users that have been provided with a username and password can access Provideam data.

The Provideam Shop Floor Execution System provides the following functions;

1. Import Work Orders from an ERP System (eg Oracle or SAP) directly or via a Business Objects derived Excel report.
2. Import Item configuration from ERP
3. Provide a customisable „Active Work Order Status? form which provides a central planning data resource and enables all relevant departments to see the status of all active Work Orders. Flexible, ad-hoc, filters allow the user to isolate the specific data they require.
4. Provide a form to enable Production Department to set production status flags. For example „Label Printing?
5. Provide the ability to timestamp Work Orders at key staging points by scanning the Bar Code on the Work Order Traveller Documents / Labels.
6. Provide Lead-Time Variance Reports which indicate the time spent by Work Order in each phase.
7. Provide Dashboard functionality which enables the user to drill-down from Plant to Department to Cell\Work Center.

Benefits: 

1. Greater global real-time visibility of each Work Order leads to better management of the Work Order. It also results in the identification and resolution of issues before significant Lead-Time delays occur.
2. Logging the flow of each Work Order facilitates an analysis of how effectively the process is currently working. This facilitates improvement activity to reduce lead-times.
3. Enhanced cross-functional process knowledge drives a reduction in Lead-Times and Inventory Levels. Thus leading to a rapid return on investment.
4. Traffic Light Reports and use of color on Dashboards supports Kanban methods.
5. Narrowing of the knowledge gap between the requirements of each of the relevant departments, Planning, Production & Quality leads to a better understand of the needs of each department and consequently an improved collaborative working method.
6. Facilitates up front planning of resources based on schedule.
7. Flexible reporting provides the data for better use of production personnel.
8. Can help with Rolls and Responsibilities, as all interaction with the system is linked to the user. Hence you can determine the individual scanning each Work Order.
9. Optional integration with Provideam?s leading OEE / Downtime Monitoring and Event Logging Solution.

Processes:

Data Import:

 DTL install a script which running on an automatic schedule (once per hour or less) imports Work Order data from the ERP (spread-sheet, database etc). The script inserts new Orders and updates changes to existing Work Orders to the Provideam Database.
A similar script imports Item configuration data from the ERP. The script inserts new Items and updates changes to existing Items to the Provideam Database.

Shop Floor Execution Data Lookup:

An "Active Work Orders Status" form is available to all authorised Provideam Users. It is possible for each user to customise the view and filter each of the columns of the form.
By clicking on a specific Order the form will expand to show a log of time spent, by the selected Work Order, in each phase. 

Shop Floor Timestamping:

Bar Code Scanning (or keyboard entry) can be used to log Work Orders as they arrive at key staging points – for example "QA Inspection". The user simply opens the appropriate form on Provideam and then scans the Work Order Bar Code on the Label or Traveller document. This flags that the Lot has reached this staging point.

Reporting:

Various reports are provided. The key report is the „Lead-Time Variance? report which shows the variability of Lead-Times between Work Orders for Items with the same „Fixed Lead-Time?. This report also shows the average time spent at each stage of the manufacturing process.

 Extra Features:

Additional features can be provided including customised reports and the ability to feed data back to the ERP system. Feedback to the ERP system can help support "Kitting, "Backflushing", "Auto Charging/Paypoints", "Outside Processing" etc.

Conclusion:

DTL Systems is a leading provider of Manufacturing Productivity Solutions. For a free consultation / demonstration please contact sales@provideam.com.
For further information check out www.provideam.com

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In this paper Paul Mitchell, MD of DTL Systems provides a case study of a typical implementation of a Provideam Solution in a Medical Devices Company. Provideam is a leading edge Manufacturing Productivity Solution developed by DTL Systems. Provideam generates Management Metrics for Lean Manufacturing Companies and is the chosen productivity solution of some of the World’s leading Life Sciences and General Manufacturing Companies.

“The Provideam Solution has been a fundamental tool in helping us achieve our annual savings and targets.”

John Quirke, Process Excellence Manager for Millipore UK and Ireland.

In recent years OEE has become the de facto standard metric of machine and process performance. Companies who use this metric to support a Continuous Improvement, Lean Management Style consistently out perform their competitors. Originally OEE was calculated manually from handwritten downtime and yield logs. Today, due to the enabling advances in Automation IT (Information Technology), manufacturers are collecting productivity data directly from production machines in real-time.

The benefits of Provideam, an automatic data collection and analysis solution, include;

• Low cost, reliable and most importantly impartial data collection
• Powerful Cross-Referencing/Querying Engine
• Potential to Store and Analyse Large volumes of Data
• Automatic Email Delivery of Shift, Day, Week Reports etc.

Approach:

Provideam is designed to be a plant-wide solution and can comfortably integrate data from all areas of your plant; from moulding to assembly to packing. However at DTL we strongly advise our customers to pilot the technology in one key area before attempting a roll-out on a plant-wide basis. The pilot enables the customer to carefully manage the technological and managerial implications of the deployment and it should ensure that the application is deployed in a way that best meets the requirements of the end user (Production, Quality and Technical Departments).

The goals of the pilot project should be well defined and relatively easy to achieve. These goals may not encompass every long-term objective you have for automated production monitoring – but that’s OK, once your pilot is successful it will be easy to refine the system over time, especially once you’ve had an opportunity to understand the capability of the system – that’s the foundation of Continuous Improvement.

Even though your pilot project shouldn’t require a huge capital investment, it should provide live, useful data which can immediately be adopted into the management of your machinery. Following a successful pilot it is a relatively straight forward task to implement the system on other similar machines. Note also that the data generated by your pilot will also be extremely useful for ‘selling’ the concept of Lean Manufacturing/Automated OEE Monitoring to other area of the plant. Provideam is sold directly to end-users or through VARs but in all cases we strongly advise on an initial pilot implementation.

Case Study:

Client:

Millipore Cork Ireland is an excellent example of a company that has implemented a Provideam Manufacturing Productivity Solution in support of its adoption of Lean Manufacturing Management. The combination of Lean Management and Provideam has enabled Millipore Cork to dramatically increase its productivity.

Millipore Cork Ireland makes a wide variety of tools to support life science research and is best known for its Filter Products. Manufacturing processes in Ireland include Injection Molding, Membrane Production, Product Assembly and Packing.

Around five years ago Millipore Cork management, recognising the ever more competitive global market place, made a strategic decision to adopt Lean Manufacturing. Following this decision, one of the key product assembly areas was selected for a trial of the concepts. From the outset Millipore Cork took the approach of simultaneously deploying Lean Management structures and automating the generation of productivity data. DTL Systems was selected to implement Provideam because of our integration expertise; our extensive experience of data collection and our appreciation of the operational and data requirements of Production Supervisors and Operators.

Pilot Project:

The trial area consisted of 10 independent assembly machines. The machines were all quite similar in terms of the functions they performed. However the control systems were not standard. The newer machines had Allen-Bradley PLCs (SLCs) with PanelView MMIs, the older machines had a variety of PLCs of varying vintages. Cork had a simple data capture network in place before the implementation of Provideam and it was the obvious decision to ‘piggy-back’ off this system. The data capture system consisted of a central SLC PLC communicating with the newer SLC PLCs over Ethernet and with the older PLCs via remote I/O. The Provideam Server Application contains a Data Collection Service which leverages OPC to connect to the widest variety of devices and systems. Although the Provideam OPC client will connect to many brands of OPC server, the single server with plug-in driver architecture of Kepware’s OPC server suite KEPServerEX allows Provideam to seamlessly connect to over 100 types of PLCs and systems all through a single consistent server interface. For this pilot, Kepware OPC Server with drivers for Allen Bradley was selected to communicate with the Data Collection PLC. Any programming required to prepare the raw data for data collection was done by Millipore Cork Engineers and Millipore Cork Controls Engineering Sub-contractors. The majority of this programming was carried out in the Data Collection PLC, rather than the Control PLCs. This has made it easier to implement improvements as there is rarely a need to modify the Control PLCs.

The Provideam Data Collection PC sends the data to a database in the Provideam Server and from there it is made available to users via an Intranet Application which can be accessed anywhere in the plant.

Fig. 1: Data Collection Schema of Cork Pilot Implementation

Extension of Pilot Project:

As an extension to the Pilot Project a number of Filter Cutting Machines were added to the Provideam System. These were each controlled by a proprietary industrial PC which was not accessible to Millipore Cork. The only interface to the control PC was an OPC Server provided by the manufacturer. The challenge for Millipore Cork was to convert the raw data generated by this OPC Server into a profile which modelled the operational mode of each machine. The solution Millipore Cork came up with was to map the raw data from the machines into the existing Data Collection PLC via Kepware’s LinkMaster Application. In the Data Collection PLC the raw data was easily manipulated to model the operating condition of each machine. This avoided the requirement to modify any logic in the control PCs.

Typical Screenshots:

Fig. 2: Real-time Dashboard – Current Status

Fig. 2 shows a typical Provideam Dashboard. The Key Performance Indicators for two machines over two shifts are displayed. The lower section of the screen shows the real-time details of the selected machine. In the above example the green lamp indicates that the machine is running.

Fig. 3: Downtime Log

Fig. 3 shows the downtime log for a selected machine. The time and duration of each stop is shown. This is very useful and enables a technician to evaluate how the machine is performing and in what sequence downtimes are occurring.

Fig. 4: OEE Time

Fig. 4 shows a graphical representation of the OEE Time for each hour of a shift for a selected machine. In this example the machine appears to be running very well. This type of screen is very useful for production supervisors to see how production is going over the course of a shift.

Fig. 5: OEE Analysis

Fig. 5 shows a typical pie OEE Analysis for a selected machine. In this example we can see that the Speed Loss is the main productivity loss. This enables the Lean Team to focus in on the main causes of productivity loss.

The above screenshots represent a small sample of what is available in Provideam. All the data displayed can also be shown in tabular form.

In the Provideam Reporting module it is possible to create customised reports for a Month, a Week, or a Customised Period etc. A very useful feature of Provideam is that reports can be scheduled to be delivered to anyone by email as soon as the shift, month etc is completed. Therefore you can get your reports sent to you without ever having to log on to Provideam.

Phase 2:

The initial machines were relatively straight forward as there was no requirement to monitor changes in Part, Tool, Lot etc. For these machines it was only necessary to know the downtime reasons and the yield. These machines typically had 100 or so downtime reasons and 3 defect reasons. The next area to implement Provideam was the Moulding Area and this was a much more complex environment requiring Lots, Material, Tools, Parts, Cavities etc. to be monitored.

The simplest method of collecting data from the moulding machines was to deploy ProvDAQ Pushbutton stations, see Fig. 6. When the machine stopped the ProvDAQ lamps flashed, prompting the operator to select a downtime reason by pressing the appropriate button on the ProvDAQ.

Fig. 6: ProvDAQ – Pushbutton Data Acquisition Terminal

Pushbuttons are labelled with each appropriate downtime or changeover reasons.

That button selection stayed illuminated until the machine was restarted. When changing from one Lot to another the operator simply pressed a ‘ChangeOver’ button. This caused a new Lot record to be created in Provideam. The Lot details were updated, in Provideam, by the Production Supervisor once the machine was running. Although this may appear an unsophisticated solution it is highly effective and quick, and avoids the need for the operator to leave the machine to record downtime data.

Roll-out:

Following successful implementation in the assembly and moulding areas, Provideam was installed in each successive area as Lean Management was introduced to that area. Each area presented some engineering challenges in terms of how to acquire data from the machines and these were addressed by matching the sophistication of the equipment with a data collection structure to suit. For example, in areas where the operators control the equipment via SCADA, Cork Controls Engineers integrated Provideam Data Capture into the SCADA Interface.

Outcomes:

1. Real-time Data – Provideam provides real-time data which allows Millipore Cork to react immediately if productivity starts to drop off. In manual reporting systems it can be hours if not days before it is realised that there has been a problem.
2. Accurate Objective Data – Provideam data is generated by the actual control system and is therefore not subjective. Note our experience is that the majority of productivity losses are due to bad machine design, bad process organisation and poor technical support rather than inefficient operators.
3. Consistent Data – In Lean Manufacturing, multi-disciplinary teams work together and constantly strive to improve performance. Having one source of productivity data ensures that the focus is on resolving productivity issues, rather than arguing about the data. It is also a great advantage to have the whole plant use the same productivity solution as this facilitates the use of a same metric system in all areas allowing you to compare different functional areas. It also offers plant-wide data via one system rather than having to rely on and compare data collection from multiple disparate systems.

Conclusion:

Provideam is used daily by, Production, Maintenance, Planning, and Process Engineering.

It enables the users to identify new areas for improvement activity while at the same time helping to lock-in productivity gains already achieved.

“The Provideam Solution has enabled us to increase Productivity by between 20 and 30% at the Millipore Cork Facility over the last 5 years. In addition, the constant monitoring provided by Provideam has ensured that these increases are maintained.”

John Quirke, Process Excellence Manager for Millipore UK and Ireland.

Recap:

The intention of this article is to demonstrate that reliable metrics for continuous improvement can be introduced very effectively by means of focused pilot projects.

The best pilot projects should offer low cost, reliable, and impartial data collection.

The likelihood of successful implementation of Automatic OEE Monitoring across an organisation can be significantly increased through the effective use of low-cost pilot implementations.

If you have any queries or would like further information, please do not hesitate to contact paul.mitchell@provideam.com