If you work in manufacturing, you understand the value of time. Production schedules are governed by time. Subassemblies and inventory are monitored for just-in-time. Catalyst-driven reactions are a function of time. Equipment is measured for uptime, and production losses are calculated due to downtime.
But while that “tick-tick-tick” you hear rules the plant floor, the meaning of time tends to stretch as you move further up the business hierarchy. Production data is often rolled up into financial metrics on a weekly, quarterly or even annual basis, making that information woefully out-of-date and, potentially, inaccurate.
Dick Hill, vice president with ARC Advisory Group, a Dedham, Mass.-based manufacturing consulting firm, comments on this discrepancy. “Up until now, there have been two major gaps in the manufacturing process. First, by the time the key performance indicators (KPIs) are presented to operating personnel, they’ve been transformed from the true economic business factors—such as profitability—to production factors, such as the impact on production of increasing flow or decreasing temperature. Operators are not seeing direct financial measurements that relate their actions to business performance.
“The second disconnect is at the business level. The pilots of the business, the C-level, are not seeing the plant performance in real time, relative to the business objectives. What managers see has been removed from the real-time world because they are using accounting systems—which were never designed to be real time—as their primary financial measure.”
Successful manufacturers know how to close the time gap between the generation of plant-floor data and its use to calculate business metrics. Organizations as diverse as a tractor manufacturer, an office product maker, a chemical and refinery plant, a producer of high-power electrodes and a first-tier automotive supplier are learning how to leverage real-time information throughout the enterprise. Here are their stories.
The hidden plant
Although manufacturers have made huge investments in automated machinery, they are seeing information gaps that are preventing them from achieving their production goals. Bert Mijten, who is based in Wickliffe, Ohio, and is a product manager for Asset Optimization with automation supplier ABB, says, “One of ABB’s goals is to help its customers find their ‘hidden plant,’ which is the underutilized capacity in a manufacturing facility.”
To provide critical real-time measurement and analysis, ABB offers Real-Time Production Intelligence (Real-TPI), a software solution that works either in standalone mode, or integrated with ABB’s IndustrialIT plant automation system. Using real-time data from existing automation systems and networks, Real-TPI monitors an entire process, such as a machine, group of machines, production line or process facility. It observes where losses occur, uses root cause analysis to determine the causes and automatically relates this information to plant personnel and production systems.
Mijten cites a successful application of Real-TPI by tractor manufacturer CNH at its plant in Antwerp, Belgium. CNH, maker of Case and New Holland equipment brands, had invested in 25 computer numerical control (CNC) machines, at a cost of $1 million each. The CNC supplier guarantees an uptime of 95 percent, or the warranty on the machines will be extended at no additional cost. As well, CNH had contracted with a third-party to provide maintenance on the equipment. In addition to improving utilization, it was extremely important to CNH to get real-time objective maintenance data in order to evaluate machine uptime and the performance of its outsourced maintenance provider.
When CNH’s plant manager put in the Real-TPI solution, the maintenance provider wasn’t happy, because now everyone in the plant could monitor its actions. However, the outsourced provider quickly became a convert to the new system, since it eliminated a lot of finger-pointing and manual troubleshooting, and decreased the time it took to solve a problem. Says Mijten, “Not only did they come to appreciate the solution, I’d say they’re now addicted to it. The sooner they can solve a problem, the bigger their bonus.”
The paper chase
Many discrete manufacturers use commercially available production schedulers that do not compare real-time production metrics against the targets. According to Tim Stoltz, warehouse manager for Avery Dennison Office Products North America, in Flowery Branch, Ga., the lack of real-time scheduling information led to a gap between his company’s enterprise resource planning systems and actual production data. This resulted in a five- to seven-day lag in baseline and root cause analysis.
Avery Dennison’s production operations include a variety of disparate systems with data that is entered manually and automatically. The company makes mailing labels, cards and other products that require 24-hour production with variable scheduling over multiple machines. Stoltz says the company sought a solution that would provide real-time data capture, scheduling and tracking.
Avery implemented a solution based on 4C@Site scheduling software from nMetric, located in Costa Mesa, Calif., and ActivPlant management software from ActivPlant Corp. (formerly EMT), in London, Ont., Canada. ActivPlant inputs the incoming schedule from 4C and tracks real-time performance vs. scheduled performance. The result is a scheduler that uses real-time data to make schedule changes on-the-fly and can be adapted to react to downtime and equipment outages.
“The Avery Dennison application is significant because it is one of the first practical, real-time, closed-loop production scheduling operations,” says Dennis Cocco, ActivPlant’s president and chief executive officer. ActivPlant software, which is built on the Microsoft .Net platform, has a data collection engine that communicates to any OPC server source, and also accepts manual-input data. In order to extract, simplify and interpret data from these various sources, the company developed a Universal Factory Data Model that is built on four data types: accumulators, incidents, events and identifiers.
Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) are hardwired to each piece of equipment, such as bar code readers, robots, numerical controls and other machines and devices. The PLCs are networked on Rockwell Automation’s Data Highway Plus and feed data into the ActivPlant data collector, where they are compared to scheduling data from the nMetric scheduling software. As well, ActivPlant accepts operator-entered data, such as operator identification, downtime, quality and tooling data. Microsoft SQL Server tracks the data and provides central storage for the system.
In assessing system performance, Stolz says the company “is using year-end results from 2003 as the metric baseline.” System installation occurred between April and December of 2003, but, says Stolz, “More than half of that time was spent defining the processes and what to put in. The installation itself took just a couple of months to complete.”
The system empowers operators, eliminates the labor and errors inherent in manual paper reporting, allows for predictive maintenance planning and provides a single, Web-based customizable interface for all plant personnel.
Reg’s to Web portal
A plant-wide portal was key to success at Showa Denko Carbon Inc., located in Ridgeville, S.C. Showa Denko manufactures ultra high-power graphite electrodes for electric arc furnace steel companies.
Upgrading to a real-time automated data collection system was initially driven by the need to comply with environmental regulations. To receive its Title V Operating Permit, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency permit that governs the release of air pollutants, Showa Denko replaced its manual process for taking differential pressure (dp) readings with an automated dp detector and data collection system.
“We are using Industrial SQL Server from Wonderware (an Invensys company based in Lake Forest, Calif.), to accumulate these readings in real-time,” says Mike Jones, process engineer at Showa Denko. “Industrial SQL Server is connected to about 800 different points, covering every process in the plant, from our bake furnaces to our extrusion press and bagging line. We’ve built an Internet interface and developed reports so personnel can view all of the tags for one piece of equipment. They can query the equipment in real time, or for some point in history.”
Showa Denko uses a production database, which it calls DARTS, to hold electrode record information—such as ID number, formula code and weights—sorted by electrode or electrode batch number. Industrial SQL Server is the time-based plant historian that monitors how each piece of equipment is running. “We’ve tied the DARTS database together with Industrial SQL Server so we can select a batch run in DARTS and pull down the historical data from Industrial SQL to monitor how the run was produced on a certain piece of equipment,” says Jones.
Jones has developed a plant Internet-based reporting system that gives every employee immediate access to real-time data and analysis. “I have a passion for this. We have fairly complex systems, with as many as 20 transducers and thermocouples on one piece of equipment. What I wanted to do was to plot those 20 different tags and trends on one single chart, and still be able to see what’s going on.”
Through the Internet-based plant Web site, employees can also access KPIs such as equipment uptime, pass/fail rate and equipment utilization. KPI trends that in the past might have been rolled up and viewed on a monthly or annual basis can now be viewed by everyone in the plant on a daily basis. Adds Jones, “We’ve made data access much easier. Instead of relying on gut feelings, operators can make decisions based on real-time data. It’s just so easy to get to the information.”
Live KPIs
Using real-time data is an important factor in presenting live KPIs to employees throughout the manufacturing organization. To drive business targets to optimum levels, Phoenix-based Honeywell Process Solutions feeds real-time data from Honeywell systems, such as the Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS), into its Business.Flex PKS software suite.
In February, the company announced Release 130 of Business.Flex PKS, which adds several new features, including an electronic operator logbook and a KPI Manager. Honeywell claims Business.Flex users can increase production by 3 percent to 6 percent while decreasing costs by 1 percent to 2 percent. According to Francois Leclerc, product line manager for Business.Flex PKS, who is based in Toronto, this can add up to savings of $300,000 to $600,000 for a typical application.
To achieve those results, a company must first identify its business goals and understand which business metrics it will measure, analyze and drive. “A key area for these applications is in performance monitoring using the KPI Manager,” says Leclerc. “One of our customers, which has a large refinery and chemical plant at its site, is deploying the KPI Manager after going through an extensive business process reengineering exercise.”
What’s interesting about this application, according to Leclerc, is that the company is tracking KPIs at multiple levels, so each individual will have a unique set of metrics that will roll up to the business goals and objectives.
Business.Flex is built on the Web framework of Microsoft .Net, which allows a wide distribution of applications throughout an enterprise. When monitoring higher-level metrics, managers can drill down to see which plant-floor metric is causing the out-of-tolerance condition.
The KPI Manager harvests real-time data from the plant’s process control systems, calculated at a high frequency, and provides an aggregate snapshot view of the plant every four hours. “In this application, the customer has asked us to provide a KPI aggregate snapshot every two hours,” says Leclerc, “This is in addition to the green-yellow-red indicators that the system provides in real-time.”
Currently, the KPI Manager, which is monitoring hundreds of different metrics, has been rolled out to about 20 percent of the 2,000 employees at the site, with the goal to have all employees using it.
Error-free production
The need for 100 percent accuracy and 100 percent quality convinced Dana Corp. to implement a real-time information management system. Dana’s Commercial Vehicle Systems Group plant in Humboldt, Tenn., manufactures steer axles and drive axles for heavy commercial vehicles such as semis and trucks. Plant Manager Bill Mossing discusses how real-time management software from I/Gear, in Louisville, Ky., drives quality throughout assembly.
“We assemble steer axles in both just-in-time and just-in-sequence order, according to the way an original equipment truck manufacturer would build its vehicles,” says Mossing. “For example, a truck manufacturer sends us an electronic Sequence Build Schedule a few days before the order is to be assembled. We pull this information into our Assembly Fail Safe (AFS) system, which is based on I/Gear manufacturing management software, and assemble the gear systems in the exact same order that the trucks will roll down the assembly line at the truck plant.”
What this means is that every other steer axle could be a different part number, with different requirements, depending on what truck is being built. The AFS system gives Dana the ability to assemble in sequence, without errors, in a “build-to-order” unit lot size of one.
Oracle Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) software downloads the schedule and parts bill of material to the I/Gear system, which directs traffic and ensures that the operators are assembling the correct parts to the steer axles. I/Gear acts as the data transport utility to manage transactions using common data links, such as OPC and Oracle native.
On any given day, the Dana plant produces more than 500 steer axles representing hundreds of different part numbers. Each steer axle contains up to 20 different major components. As the axle moves to an assembly station on the line, it is locked in place, and parts information is read from a bar code label. Parts data is displayed on a thin-client computer monitor located at each station, which prompts the operator to select the appropriate parts and assemble them to the axle. In order to unlock the assembly from the station, the operator must scan the barcode numbers for the selected parts to ensure that the axle is assembled correctly.
“One of the nice features of the system is that it captures cycle times and production numbers for the assembly lines. It also provides exception reports with the capability to send a real-time e-mail notification for corrective action,” says Mossing.
In addition to ensuring quality, the I/Gear system adds value by providing an audit trail and error-proofing solution, according to Joe Brangers, technical leader at Dana’s system integrator, Advanced Production Systems (APS), based in Louisville, Ky. Brangers says APS is working with several other Dana plants to incorporate a new system—called the GearBox—that combines I/Gear DTU software with hardware from Wago Gmbh, a German manufacturer of controllers and input/output (I/O) solutions.
GearBox uses the Wago Programmable Fieldbus Controller to collect and buffer data between the plant-floor PLCs and enterprise business software. Brangers says the advantages of GearBox are twofold: it is optimized for fast deployment, and it helps lower costs. “With GearBox, we can solve plant-floor problems very quickly, and we have reduced our development and deployment time by 20 percent to 25 percent.”
For manufacturers ready to improve performance by integrating real-time production data into their business systems, ARC’s Hill has this advice. First, develop a consensus on the KPIs and targets that are unique to your business objectives. Second, measure them, using the appropriate infrastructure and real-time data. And finally, distribute this information to all decision-makers in the enterprise, from the operators, who have their hands on the controls, to the top-level executives.
See sidebar to this article: Solutions for Real-Time Performance
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