Future Factories

Contactless RFID/WiFi driven work-in-process solutions are driving mega factories of the future. We look at the current scenario in the manufacturing space

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

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On a daily basis, mega factories like those building airplanes and cars deal with millions of products , being built on the shop floor and being supplied from their vendors. Even a minor delay is capable of causing a domino effect and can influence productivity and efficiency. Therefore to stay competitive, lean manufacturers need their personnel to be equipped with real time visibility on work-in-process to immediately react to changes and address issues. What is also required in order to provide better customer service is the need to track the parts, components, or raw materials that make up the end product without impacting their operations and increasing their costs.

Work In Process visibility in Lean Manufacturing
Lean manufacturing or lean production, which is often known simply as 'Lean' means more value with less work. A variation on the theme of efficiency, Lean manufacturing is a present-day instance of the larger recurring theme in human life of increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, and using new innovative methods to decide what matters, rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing ideas of what matters. Lean principles come from Japanese manufacturing industry, mainly from the Toyota Production System. Any Lean manufacturer in order to realize wasteful use of resources and to create more value for the customer, needs an in-depth knowledge of various activities on the shop floor. Therefore, some of the key components of Lean manufacturing are reducing wastes, smoothening production flows and real time visibility. Let's see what the current scenario is in the manufacturing space.

Manual processes
Even today, manual entry of job information into a computer or a hand held device is what most of the current commercially available work-in-process tracking solutions rely on. Even though more advanced implementations might use a bar code reader to track work order, job router, employee, parts and work station. In each case, manual intervention from the employee is required. Manual process being subject to errors, delays and tampering make the situation of reduced profitability, speed to market and customer satisfaction inevitable. If only a single stage of the manufacturing process includes a manual data capture, the entire process becomes dependent on the accuracy and timeliness of this step.

RFID/Barcode readers without any human intervention send tracking information to backend systems in real time.

Real time trouble
For analysis and planning, most manufacturers are working on historical or in the best cases near real time data for analysis and planning purposes. Therefore, the absence of accurate real time data results in revelation of problems often after they have occurred. The cost of fixing them goes exponentially high with the time it requires to identify them.

Lack of integration
Lack of integration and real time data becomes a hurdle when it comes to applying intelligence to processes and machines. In the past, we have seen intelligent automation introducing new supervisory functions that analyzed, identified and also corrected abnormal conditions. But with equipment becoming more sophisticated and collaborative, real time data needs to be fed in order to rapidly adapt to new conditions.

Shop floor tracking
Another major problem in the current shop floor tracking solutions require significant process changes to integrate the new data capture elements, and therefore requires expensive changes in the way people and machines work. When additional training is required it also takes people's attention from the main production task.

Expensive Shop-Floor to Top-Floor integration
Most of the work-in-process solutions take a top-down approach in solving the tracking of work orders, people and assets. The Lean manufacturing trend has had vendors of back end infrastructure such as ERP, MRP, and WMS in the driver seat. The proposed solutions mostly require the devices and logic at the end to adapt to the application's architecture. As a result, one major consequence is lengthy and expensive projects where the majority of investments are spent on the configuration of the back end infrastructure with little consideration for the device, data, security and work flow integration as a result fails to achieve accurate real time data.

Restricted visibility
A smooth production flow is achieved not only throughout the factory but also in collaboration with suppliers. Manufacturers benefit from reducing wastes and smoother production but the benefits increase manifolds when the suppliers follow the same principles to improve their own production.
When applied at the suppliers end as well, it fosters more collaboration and encourages lean thinking up and down the supply chain.

Unfortunately, today's work-in-process tracking solutions offer no visibility outside the four walls of the production environment. Delays, material shortages, and priorities can not be handled until they become real problems that need immediate attention or are stopping the production.

Enabling automated real time data capture
Innovations in contactless technologies and solutions like those based on RFID and Wi-FI has brought reliability and accuracy to the industry and also have significantly reduced costs of solutions based on these. Pushing new manufacturing processes through the above mentioned bottlenecks are Radio Frequency based hardware and software solutions. These do not require line of site and manual intervention anymore to read information on fast moving objects or groups of items in large quantity. Apart from acting like a catalyst and speeding up processes, contactless technologies are making them more reliable and tamper proof. Also there is a direct positive effect on productivity as humans focus more on value adding activities instead of repeatable tasks.

Real-time intelligence on the Shop-floor
Achievement of the manufacturer's goals is impossible if this new real time data capture is handled by the back end infrastructure. This not being something to do with application performance or network latency can't be solved with better computing and network resources. It's a fundamental architecture decision that a few manufacturers are taking. The decision being to distribute processing where the action is. Processing of data at the edge of the network empowers employees and managers with real time data and provides them with the ability to make changes before it's too late.

Integration of real time supply chain information
Purchase order(PO) and advanced shipping notice(ASN) is what the current collaboration between suppliers and their manufacturers is limited to. The supplier starts the production when the PO is received and notifies that the product is being shipped to its destination through the ASN. Therefore, one of the largest opportunities for the manufacturing industry to improve productivity and reduce costs lie in the time between the PO reception and the ASN creation and the variations that come with it.

Migrating from UPC to EPC/ RFID
Real time information on asset movement without requiring any human intervention is possible to achieve through EPC/RFID tags. Adding on to it, EPC tags can carry far more information than conventional barcodes. Therefore, decoding the EPC tag information in real time with appropriate business applications can help improve process efficiency, security and quality.

Advantage
At the shop-floor level, integration of EPC tags helps in realizing the real picture. Without any human intervention, such solutions can provide a real time analysis of the status of products. An in depth study of the current stage, reports can be generated giving the plant manager a complete overview.

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