Many enterprises in today’s manufacturing landscape want to advance their operations into the digital age but lack the skills or available resources to remake themselves into anything close to the smart manufacturing ideal. As a result, those companies rely on outside consulting to help them navigate the uncertain waters of digital transformation. This article identifies some recurring themes encountered during those digitalization consulting engagements and provides strategic guidance.
Not unexpectedly, most companies seek to streamline their existing procedures and automate manual processes – but many also struggle with variability between operations teams located throughout their facilities and have difficulty consistently staffing qualified people. Further, the benefits they strive for hinge on eliminating wasteful practices across several business domains like inventory; production management and execution; maintenance; and quality assurance.
All these business domains are fertile ground for recommending improvements based on lean principles and various other experiential methods – intended to eliminate non-value-added activities, maximize performance and streamline workflows. Some examples of these foundational principles and methods include the following:
- Eliminate waste to achieve more output from existing resources
- Evaluate each task as a value-add and eliminate ones that don’t add saleable value
- Reduce/eliminate extra motion or effort
- Reduce/eliminate waiting (information query and response, approvals)
- Reduce/eliminate defects (meet or exceed expectations on the first try, minimize product changeover transition effects)
- Reduce/eliminate lost creativity (free up best resources for innovating/improving)
- Establish and adhere to best practices
- Capture best practices from existing experts before that knowledge walks out the door
- Standardize and document methods and tools across the plant and enterprise
- Apply governance to maintain improvements (regular reporting and auditing, adapt to long-term evolutions)
- Maximize resource utilization (match skills to task)
- Investigate, verify and document applicable training and skills
- Clearly define necessary skills for work tasks
- Provide tools and visualization for planning personnel and assignments based on activity requirements (identify potential issues and fix)
- Utilize analytics to identify opportunities for improvement and track progress
- Establish/define key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics and visualize them often
- Improve planning by tracking with more granularity and use past performance to inform future work plans
- Support sales commitments to visualize real-time backlog, current production plans and near-term capacity
- Consolidate and simplify master data management (use only one version of the truth)
- Manage data where most appropriate, but join data from all systems to a common viewport for ease of reference and management
- Consolidate all data, but organize/structure it by useful domains and categories
- Simplify management workflows according to personnel roles
Some recommended activities based on these guiding principles are listed in the discussion that follows. These potential actions are organized according to their common impact so that plant and enterprise management can prioritize them for further investigation or to achieve desirable outcomes through implemented projects.
Increase Efficiency and Raise Bottom Line
At the core of lean is the idea that if companies eliminate non-value-added work, they can achieve efficiency improvement and the financial gains that result. Here are some example actions intended to address that goal.
Streamline ERP Workflows
As a primary component of managing a company’s operations, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is involved in almost every aspect of the production lifecycle at the plant. Its main purpose is to translate customer orders into actionable process activities and record the results, but it often involves a substantial amount of manual effort to accomplish that – especially when the ERP has been around for a while. The existing workflows have likely evolved over time and become quite tedious, but when it happens slowly the people involved just adapt and may not even realize how inefficient the process has become.
A potential fix for this is to study all the workflows to document the process inefficiencies and then integrate other automations at the manufacturing execution system (MES) and control layers to reduce manual effort and increase accuracy of recorded results. If the ERP workflow can’t be changed, at least removing manual effort from the equation can recapture some wasted effort.
Implement Warehouse Management
The inventory management implemented in an ERP often lacks granularity, such that tracking the location of materials is limited to just a general area of the plant. The resulting ‘treasure hunt’ that is often required to find materials needed for a production task wastes time and resources.
Manual tracking of material consumption is not only slow, but it’s also susceptible to errors that can cause confusion and delays requiring even more time and effort to manually resolve. Typically, only a significant daily effort to manually verify material inventories and make corrections to the ERP as needed can help mitigate this problem.
Warehouse management can alleviate this problem and improve the effectiveness of MES track and trace features, since detailed raw material tracing starts in the warehouse. This early-stage process provides granular material lots, which provide a solid basis to integrate all systems that participate in tracking the end-to-end flow of raw materials to finished goods.
Automate Material Preparations
Any manual efforts related to preparing and organizing raw materials for later consumption is another obvious weak link in the long chain of production workflow. When tasks are manually performed, their planning and completion must be synchronized with specific timing of the process, which leads to mistakes and inaccurate documentation of process actions.
In addition to needing more people to perform the manual work, the wasted motion and wait time inherent with manual preparations make it a struggle to stay ahead of production – and the inevitable lag in preparation causes slowdowns or delayed starts that directly impact plant performance. Converting these manual activities to automated ones will avoid these problems and achieve a more efficient and predictable result.
Improve Utility Efficiency
Another commonly expressed goal is to reduce energy use and the corresponding carbon footprint by eliminating wasteful consumption. There are several utilities that would be applicable to that effort, like water, air, gas, electricity and steam (WAGES). Plant personnel should focus their efforts where the most impact can be felt, which depends on which of these are most dominantly used. Often, the best preliminary action is to monitor existing usage. The baselines established help refine priorities and create the opportunity to realistically assess improvements.
While most utilities come into play, electricity is the most common target for improvement because it is so easy to measure. Replacing DC motors with more efficient AC motors, for instance, is a very common approach used. Replacing on/off control of AC motors with variable frequency drive (VFD) control is another simple and successful method for reducing wasteful energy use.
Achieve Consistency through Standardization
Standardizing operating methods will improve consistency of operations and product quality. In addition, standardizing automation systems across multiple plants will also reduce the support burden on an enterprise’s thinly staffed technical resources.
Standardize Methods
As part of any automation development effort, a worthy goal is to standardize how things are done from one area of the plant to the next and from one plant to the next. One example is following a similar operations model across all plants so that automation systems can share, aggregate and analyze information in a common and meaningful way. Where automation systems differ between plants but where operations are similarly defined, user interactions with those systems would still be the same and results are more easily compared.
Standardize Systems and Implementations
There are several industry-standard methodologies currently available that apply to various aspects of automation improvement projects. When these methodologies are combined in a holistic approach, a highly effective automation solution will result. Developing a common design basis that follows the ISA standards and duplicating that design and related logic to all plants greatly improves supportability and reduces downtime should systems fail.
Covering a broad section of plant automation, the de facto standards – ISA-95, ISA-88, ISA-106 and ISA-101 – describe how ERP, MES, process control and HMIs should be integrated in an industry-standard way, while maximizing the choices for potential solutions and also the availability of technical staff to support them. As a result, automation systems are easier to support and maintain, and more intuitive to operate.
Normalize Data Collection
Another area where reducing variation will enable gains is the collection of data used for performance metrics. Visualizing performance and comparing results over time or across plants benefits from a consistent and well-documented approach. Generally centered around overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), standardized performance metrics are well defined, and their use will not only enable comparisons between plants within the enterprise but also with external industry benchmarks.
Address Personnel Limitations
No holistic approach to improving operations is complete without some consideration of personnel aspects and workforce culture. Even the best automation solution will fall short of its potential beneficial effect on operations without factoring in workforce realities. The most desired outcomes are attracting and keeping good employees and maximizing their opportunities for success.
Workforce Deficiency – Training
Today’s workplace culture must support varying degrees of career development needs. Typically, new hires will require adequate training based on skill level and financial incentives for meeting company expectations. This requires additional overhead cost, so success of the training is critical to the bottom line in many ways.
The effectiveness and speed of training relies on how well it aligns with today’s most dominant learning style in the age of social media platforms. Switching from default lecture-style training sessions to more self-served, video-based training is a good approach and adds to the longevity of the training, since later review or refreshment is easily supported.
Making the training more self-managed reduces demand on trainer resources but must be incentivized to ensure follow-through. One way is to utilize pay grades that change when training success is achieved and verified through testing. The end result is a simpler and more deliberate system of self-improvement and reward that naturally speeds the process of new hire development and eliminates any perceived ambiguity of a worker’s skill level.
Simplify Task Execution
Improved worker effectiveness can also be achieved by simplifying the execution of tasks using automation aids for worker guidance and verifying successful task completion. Complicated tasks that involve multiple steps can be simplified and paired with a binary confirmation (yes/no) that eliminates ambiguity or the need for explanation. Not only does this make the task easier to understand, accomplish and verify, it makes the implementation of automated guidance simpler – simplifying interaction with hand-held devices.
Manual tasks are typically the target for this improvement. Some examples might be:
- Preparing raw materials for an order
- Verifying quantities of raw materials manually transferred or added into the process
- Starting up a line and verifying proper steady-state operation
- Sampling WIP or product and testing for viability or adherence to tolerances
- Marking and verifying product containers
- Cleaning equipment for transition to a new product variant
Improve Real-Time Process Visibility
Another common workforce deficiency is when operators have limited access to current process and equipment status, and the absence of clear written work instructions or other helpful reference information pertinent to their job. While most major production areas have a human-machine interface (HMI) available, it is often obscured by equipment or too far away – making it unreadable unless standing directly in front of it. Integrating hand-held devices can make a big difference in these cases.
The examples above are some common issues encountered during an enterprise’s journey toward digitalization and the smart manufacturing ideal. Though lacking skilled technical resources of their own, companies can partner with external automation solutions providers to guide them past potential strategy and implementation pitfalls on their way to ultimate success. Proper application of lean principles and other time-tested improvement methods will help them trim waste, improve operating performance and maximize workforce effectiveness to become the world-beating producer they aspire to be.
