Helping SMEs in Digital Transformation
Published on : Monday 30-11--0001
The 4th Industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, is all about data driven process management to derive better performance and quality. The process data is collected and analysed to find ways to improve OEE.
IoTSense is a scalable platform that can be adopted by SMEs very quickly and non-intrusively and start getting early results in as less as a month.
Out of the box support for most industry standard protocols and a very intuitive UI helps users to quickly connect and configure the plant machinery and start streaming process parameters.
The inbuilt edge compute and triggering mechanism helps managers to be informed of all deviations in real time thus reducing the time to respond drastically which ultimately helps in increasing the productivity.
Operation challenges faced by SMEs
SMEs comprise mostly of Tier 1 and Tier 2 manufacturers that manufacture discrete components for automotive/switchgear OEMs. The OEMs are highly organised and drive, manage and control the supply chain to support lean management.
This means each component order to a T1/T2 vendor comes with a strict delivery schedule, which if not met may result in disruption of the assembly lines of OEMs ultimately leading to a lot of production loss and may result in some penalties.
Production and machine load planning/routing is done by the vendors using excel or other tools but monitoring is done manually. The operational complexity is increased further as many vendors undertake work for multiple components for multiple OEMs. All this leads to almost nil visibility on the work in progress on a day to day basis.
To avoid line holdups of OEMs and mitigate the associated risk, most vendors try to maintain a substantial FG inventory as they do not have precise control on the daily production which adds a substantial burden on the working capital.
IoTSense addressing the challenges
Winjit’s product engineering team has created a Work-in-Progress monitoring solution built on top of the IoTSense platform.
The Work-in-Progress monitoring system helps trace the life cycle of the components from RM stage through various operations to FG stage in a very nonintrusive manner. The plant operations work load is untouched with no added workloads. The solution acquires the necessary data points from the process equipment like PLC and CNC via M2M communication.
IoTSense bridges the Operations Technology to Information Technology and helps the shop floor resources in managing operations by raising discrete alerts and providing actionable insights.
All the real-time production data from the machine is collected and then systemised to generate MIS.
Benefits of IoTSense
- Enabling Kaizen enablers to machine operators in form of real-time progress charts for production count and quality data
- Alerts to supervisors and managers to tackle breakdowns/slowdowns with escalation matrix
- Part number traceability
- Bin card/route card traceability
- Various reports to monitor A, P and Q of OEE
- Predictive maintenance alerts
- Manage changeovers better
- Advance knowledge of next jobs for work stations, and
- Track process parameters in real time to fine tune optimum performance.