Manufacturing (Doors)

Overview

A US-based manufacturing company was making a move to become paperless. Within their system, schedules are created in the ERP system by aligning work orders based on their priority. Plant personnel view the orders and execute them sequentially.

As part of their production process, they would provide printed work orders to the staff members. If orders needed to be changed, the full days’ production itinerary would need to be reprinted, costing the company an exorbitant amount in materials and disposal. OpteBiz was hired to help eliminate the printing expenses and reliance on paper products.

Old Process Pain Points

Before starting a new work order, many setup parameters need to be entered manually onto the machine. This is not only time-consuming but information may be spread across multiple papers leading to misinterpretations. In case runs are of smaller sizes or a single unit, this process requires significant time for modification from a production perspective. If the schedule is changed during a day, manual coordination is required between operators at different machines to synchronize the production. Printed schedule is distributed to operators increasing the cost of paper and printing.

Ignition SCADA approach

• Receive daily schedule from ERP and display at designated HMIs for viewing and adjustments.
• Scope should be available to give an alert on receipt of new schedule from ERP along with their priorities as 1, 2 or 4, update HMIs with the status and progress of the work order execution.
• Along with the schedule, ERP also sends bills of material (BOM) and job setup parameters (JSP).
• Refresh HMIs with BOM and JSPs where ever required by synchronization of JSPs to PLCs whenever a new Job is detected.
• As each door moves from one machine to another, in a line, capture all the PIs from PLC for complete material tracking and production status.
• Scope should be available to partially produce a Work Order in case of lack of material and re-execute the same at the later date and time.

OpteBiz Advantage

Ignition was used as the SCADA to take care of all the above requirements. It was optimized to work in sync with priority production processes. Its off-the-shelf database connectivity has helped in making a user-friendly UI with increased efficiency in terms of performance and look and feel. All three production lines were running in a very short span of about 4 months, meeting all the above requirements with great satisfaction of the client. Another project was also awarded based on our efficient project execution and support.

OpteBiz helped the client achieve a 5 % reduction in downtime, 30% reduction in labor costs related to data entry, and 2%  increased throughput which resulted in huge savings in paper reduction which is better for the environment, and increased flexibility due to paperless environment.