Have you ever paid attention to those high-quality stainless steel washing machines and dryers in commercial laundries? They are also found behind the scenes in hospitals, nursing homes, hotels and motels. Chances are they are manufactured in the Fairfield, Iowa, plant of Dexter Laundry Inc., a unit of Dexter Apache Holdings Inc. Making those huge commercial laundry machines at a profit is not an easy task.

As Tony Praza, vice president of information technology and continuous improvement, says,
“Have you seen the price of stainless steel? It’s been skyrocketing.” Add to that the need to enhance product features while meeting competitive price pressures, and initiatives to reduce manufacturing cost rather quickly get pushed into high visibility.

Dexter’s roots go back more than 100 years, and for a time, the company was part of Ford Motor Co. It’s now an employee stock ownership program (ESOP) company, a fact to which Praza points with pride. The manufacturing strategy Dexter is using to cut waste and improve profitability is Lean Manufacturing.

To drive the Lean initiative and provide the kind of information it needs to do its job, Praza has led an effort to implement a shop-floor reporting system. In fact, Praza has been building shop-floor reporting systems since the 1970s, when he made a switch from engineering to systems. For the Dexter project, he uses software from Alpharetta, Ga.-based Infor Global Solutions.
“We’ve had the Infor XA MES MDCC Suite up and running for over two years now. We use bar codes as the data source, and plan to expand its use where applicable,” says Praza.

It doesn’t make sense to bar code everything—for example, when an employee can key in a three- to four-digit employee number. But the combination of keyed-in information and bar-coded information provides a wealth of information to the system, which can then track plant-floor events. When employees log on, they can see their operations, work in process, set-up instructions, quantity to produce and the like. After processing, they can log back on and enter parts produced. Given the types of operations in this sheet metal fabricating facility, automatic data collection from the process just doesn’t seem justified.

Part of the benefit Dexter has seen comes from integration with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Praza sees the integration that results from having the manufacturing execution system (MES) and the ERP system from the same supplier as a big benefit. But the real benefit is the ability to capture data. “Some company’s Lean events have nothing to do with information,
but every time we have a Lean event, IT plays a part in making the change. We’ve gained significant profitability, as well as improved safety, because of these activities,” summarizes Praza.

Suds to silicon

From washing machines to microchip manufacturing, the software solution loosely named manufacturing execution systems (MES) provide the information backbone managers are using to cut costs, get products manufactured more quickly and eliminate waste. Imagine the design challenge of inspecting traces etched into microprocessor chips. The 5 feet by 4 feet by 5 feet inspection machines from KLA-Tencor Corp., in
Milpitas, Calif., weigh in at about 3,000 pounds. Even at that size, a granite base is required to maintain machine stability. The traces are so small that it’s even hard to use optical technology anymore.

And the machines don’t last a long time, or as John Moore, quality program manager notes, “
Moore’s Law lives (referring to former Intel executive Gordon Moore, who famously predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every 18 months). Every three to four years, manufacturers design smaller chips, so we have to keep up and understand defects on chips with ever-smaller traces. We’re forever challenged to deliver faster, better tools and get them to market more quickly.”

Machines undergo improvements over time and John Moore’s team at KLA-Tencor was frustrated by a lack of visibility into product genealogy of each machine “as built.” They looked into the company’s Oracle ERP system, the product data management system and the potential customer relationship management system. But bringing in an MES solution not only gave them track-and-trace capability, but it also can show them other things, such as process procedures to test, and the full configuration of the product through manufacturing. They went with Datasweep—now part of Rockwell Automation Inc.,
Milwaukee. “It had a lot of back-end database capability, but the user interface was a little lacking. It did have a rich ...