"You cannot imagine that we are actually producing in the 21st century." This is a statement that you may have heard before; or maybe you have already made such a statement yourself. It possibly had to do with one of the following situations:
- A production order has already finished when it appears that the settings of a machine were incorrect. Result – Rework or Scrap!
- At the end of the shift, the line managers record the production quota on a sheet, and then copy it to the Excel file. While they are doing this, they wonder who is ever going to look at this data.
- Your technician is busy with the less urgent optimisation of a line, while the busiest line has been standing still for an hour. The next day, his supervisor enquires about the cause of this 'downtime'.
- The batch-linked documents are not available at the start of the order. The consequence - simply walk over to planning to pick them up.
Imagine that you could convert your production site to a Factory of the Future today.
A site where orders are automatically generated based on the needs of the customer and the availability of the raw materials from the supplier. A site where these production orders are electronically "pushed" to your work centre, including the correct machine settings. A site where these machines automatically track when there have been downtimes, how long they lasted, and which part of the machine was involved. A site where a real-time ANDON dashboard based on the machine PLC gives all parties an overview of the status of the work centres. A site where automatic reporting follows from the electronic logging of the stoppages. This is possibly still a long way off, but is nevertheless worth the effort of allowing your company to grow towards the Factory of the Future.
Jeroen Van den Hove
