Smarter manufacturing
Manufacturing intelligence brings benefits from the bottom up at SHOWA Denko, MacSteel, and Chevron
By April Terreri, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 6/1/2003 6:00:00 AM
For all the talk about enterprise performance management, for some companies, performance may be getting its biggest nudge at the plant-floor level with a new generation of manufacturing intelligence solutions. The software packages that fall under this banner vary, but their users, instead of talking technology, can list tangible benefits—like less scrap.
"Because we monitor our processes on a real-time basis, and fine-tune them, we have drastically reduced our scrap levels," says Mark Little, systems engineer for Ridgeville, S.C.-based SHOWA Denko Carbon.
Scrap in one process had been running as high as 5 percent for the company, which produces large-diameter, ultrahigh-power graphite electrodes under a month-long manufacturing process. The electrodes are used in electric arc furnaces in steel mills throughout the world.
The solution SHOWA Denko Carbon turned to was IndustrialSQL Server, a production data historian from Lake Forest, Calif.-based Wonderware Corp. The software collects production data at critical processing points.
"We can now quickly respond to the collected data, making any necessary changes," Little says. "We now have more insight into our processes and equipment efficiency performance."
Baking, finishing, and "bag house" operations have seen improvement. Bag houses are like huge vacuum cleaners that collect dust from the manufacturing plant as electrodes are manufactured. Bag house dust emissions, resulting from electrode production, were a major concern for the company. "We continuously monitor the health of our 12 bag houses, and we can predict any failures or problems," says Little. "Before, we never knew we had a problem until we could actually see the dust coming from the stack."
Linking the historian with data generated by a piece of equipment called a laser micrometer results in an estimated $30,000 in annual savings, Little confirms. "Now we can record all the collected information and adjust machines as required to assure accurate electrode diameters," Little says.
Plant historians are one type of application being touted as manufacturing intelligence solutions, but historian vendors don't have a corner on this market. A class of vendors that some experts have dubbed enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) providers is smack in the middle of the trend. Major vendors of industrial automation software such as Wonderware and Charlottesville, Va.-based GE Fanuc Automation also are plant intelligence suppliers.
Looked at more loosely, a number of other vendors—including vendors with roots in manufacturing execution—offer analytical tools for operational intelligence. While understanding this vendor landscape can be useful, so is a look at the metrics that manufacturers are seeking to improve.
Spot the cause
"The key thing to understand is that the most important metrics are the ones that are the most difficult to achieve because they require data from what traditionally came from different and disparate systems," says Bill Swanton, a vice president of Boston-based analyst firm AMR Research. "For example, measuring productivity by itself and then measuring on-time delivery by itself is not really productive. But measuring how to maintain your customer-service level means that you have to pull together both of those metrics."
Scrap is one plant-level metric many companies follow closely. So is machine downtime.
"Anytime you are down, you are not producing—so you've got to run your equipment more efficiently to contribute to your bottom line," says Steve Heinrichs, data processing supervisor for MacSteel, a Fort Smith, Ark.-based supplier of steel bar to the automotive industry.
MacSteel uses Illuminator 9.5, a manufacturing intelligence portal from Exton, Pa.-based Lighthammer Software Development Corp., to help stay on track with its broader goals. "Manufacturing intelligence fits nicely into our plan of lean manufacturing and continuous improvement, because as things get more and more competitive, you must continuously improve and adapt," Heinrichs says.
Producing steel grades from customers' exact chemistry specs is a major goal. "We track the steel's chemistry throughout the processing operations," says Heinrichs. Prior to deploying manufacturing intelligence tools, the company could not query against both business and plant systems simultaneously. Using Illuminator's portal capabilities, MacSteel merges information from both systems into a single display for users. "I can color-context them, based on whether they are out of spec or not," Heinrichs explains.
Pareto charts display diagrams of delays and downtimes of specific equipment. Alarm occurrence history logs assist in diagnosing root causes of problems. Says Heinrichs, "These charts are great for production management to be able to focus on the main cause of any problems or delays, while also tracking progress."
The company recently achieved a 75-percent reduction in set-up time for a machine used to straighten steel bars as a result of a continuous improvement session called a Kaizen event. According to Heinrichs, viewing integrated statistics via Illuminator helps in this type of decision-making, and in keeping improvements on-track.
MacSteel also monitors kilowatt consumption per ton of produced steel and electrode consumption with the portal. "It's important to monitor these things to keep our business running efficiently, while improving our reliability," Heinrichs says.
Metrics that matter
Vendor executives agree that metrics at the plant-floor level can be some of the most crucial. "Any improvement in performance and efficiency of the plant really drops to the bottom line. ROI is dramatic here, especially when you compare it with trying to improve sales or market share," says Tom Muth, product marketing manager for Wonderware. "You can do things like eliminate bottlenecks, open up new capacity within existing plant space, and improve on-time deliveries."
Robert Neivert, a senior product marketing manager for San Jose, Calif.-based Datasweep, says that while operational goals such as improving yield are critical, the bigger objective is profitability. In fact, says Neivert, this is why Datasweep, whose roots are in manufacturing execution systems, has evolved into a supplier of "operations performance management" solutions, building on its analytics capabilities.
For Datasweep, says Neivert, the intelligence isn't limited to data about the manufacturing process itself, but also detailed, "as built" product information. "Our customers want us to help them achieve performance improvements across the product life cycle and supply chain through enhanced visibility for decision-making at all levels of the enterprise," Neivert says. "You can't manage what you don't measure."
GE Fanuc Automation, part of General Electric (GE), is a believer in the Six Sigma approach to improving business and operations processes. Kevin Roach, a GE Fanuc vice president, says plant intelligence applications fit in well with Six Sigma's emphasis on determining root causes to problems and finding improvements that reduce or eliminate problems.
Roach relates that one of GE Fanuc's customers, a manufacturer of consumer products, initially told GE Fanuc that it needed a statistical process control software package. Through further questioning, it was clear the customer wanted to improve quality.
"We asked them why, and they told us they wanted to analyze why they were having so many field failures," says Roach. Additional questioning uncovered the customer was unable to data-mine information on units it was producing because it had no plant data historian. "We finally determined what they really wanted was a warranty abatement system so they could reduce the cost of achieving quality, while reducing the cost of warranties," Roach explains.
Assessing lost opportunities is another approach, says Mike Gonzalez, co-founder and executive vice president of Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based IndX Software Corp., developers of the XHQ operations intelligence platform. "One common approach to improvement is to try to do better than you did in the past," Gonzalez says. "But that just might set too low a standard when compared with what is really possible."
Instead, companies compare how they are doing at any moment against the ideal maximum for a particular process. "This is a form of 'target management'—where, in real time, you can see in economic terms what you are losing by not reaching the achievable maximum," says Gonzalez.
AMR's Swanton notes that Overall Equipment Effectiveness, or OEE, which evaluates the potential productive capacity of a plant, is an increasingly important metric, as are metrics related to labor. But when it comes right down to it, he says, manufacturers are choosing metrics "that try to avoid bad behavior. They are trying to get a consistent set of metrics across factories and they are choosing metrics that will help drive the right behaviors through all levels of the enterprise."
Tools of the trade
There are varying vendor approaches to plant intelligence software. Some applications are heavy on the use of portal technology to visualize trends, while some solutions, such as plant data historians, focus more on the ability to aggregate, store, and analyze data. Some vendors, such as Ontario-based Executive Manufacturing Technologies (EMT), offer a combination of visualization and data-aggregation capability.
Plant-focused portals, however, need to integrate with low-level sources of plant data to be effective. "This is where the use of a portal comes into play in getting the information into the required context in real time—and also tying in other data sources," says Wonderware's Muth. Additionally, Muth contends, portals enable a company's manufacturing managers, en masse, to address productivity improvements on a sustainable basis.
One thing most vendors are stressing is key performance indicators (KPIs) for the plant. "Dashboards are part of the manufacturing intelligence deliverable and offer Web-based views of KPIs impacting plant performance," says Frank Platt, a Lighthammer vice president. "It's all about enabling continuous improvement, and about the integration of plant systems to enterprise systems. These capabilities promote an accurate view of what's happening throughout the supply chain so important business decisions can be made on a timely basis."
GE Fanuc uses digital cockpits capable of displaying role-specific information to users. "This gives workers the ability to identify and measure operations and make corrections when necessary—all in real time, which really drives agility," Roach says.
Datasweep stresses that it's helpful to integrate analytics with plant execution so that decisions are based on the latest data. "For instance, if a process change is made in the execution system to fix a problem such as quality, the new process also may require a change in the calculations stored in the analytics system to deliver correct assumptions," Neivert says. "But if your execution system isn't integrated with analytics, that change may never be recorded in the analytics system. This can result in 'broken analytics'—or, decisions based on incorrect calculations."
Dashboards become even more important as more OEMs outsource manufacturing, Neivert contends. "You might have an OEM that is subcontracting to three separate contract manufacturers," says Neivert. "By using Web technologies and roles-based privileges, each one of those contract manufacturers can now view their performance via supplier scoring, while OEMs benefit from aggregated information across multiple contract manufacturers."
Harry Merkin, director of commercial marketing with GE Fanuc, says that for one automotive supplier using GE Fanuc's iHistorian plantwide data historian, the solution helped uncover hidden capacity. "Using iHistorian, the manufacturer discovered micro-downtime events," says Merkin. "Milliseconds of downtime here and there equated to hours of lost production."
While companies often aim for different plant-level metrics, as vendor executives see it, manufacturing intelligence tools can improve almost any plant-level metric out there. As Wonderware's Muth puts it, "In tight times such as today, companies have a stronger need to accelerate their performance improvements and get as much as they can out of their existing assets. It starts with collecting manufacturing data, and it's a cycle of continuous improvement."
| Who's inside | ||
| Datasweep: www.datasweep.com | Executive Manufacturing Technologies: www.visualplant.com | GE Fanuc Automation: www.geindustrial.com |
| IndX Software: www.indxhq.com | Lighthammer: www.lighthammer.com | Wonderware: www.wonderware.com |
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