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It’s good to talk but let’s be selective
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03/02/2003
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Integration between shop floor and business systems can cut spoilage and waste, increase efficiency and improve customer service, according to the vast majority of manufacturers and consultants. Although these worthy goals may lack the apparent excitement and potential for profit that can result from agile supply chain projects touted by some of the software vendors, they nevertheless represent real business priorities not least because they are the information foundation upon which all else ultimately stands or falls.
Whatever their scale, however, integration project proposals often meet resistance. Undoubtedly, the relative immaturity of integration is partly to blame. Peter Hopkinson, principal consultant with Atos Origin, believes that while there’s a lot of expertise in plant and factory controls, with IT systems catching up fast, “in terms of integration we are way down the curve.”
And this in turn has a lot to do with attitudes. On one particular project, although Hopkinson could demonstrate a return on investment within three months, a manufacturer had trouble in seeing beyond the initial high project price tag – perhaps evidencing how little expectation there is in some quarters for direct return on investment (ROI) from IT projects.
Thus the first step for any integration project is to understand and quantify the business goals. At Bespak, which manufactures pharmaceutical delivery devices, currently under careful investigation are benefits that could flow from greater integration specifically with shop floor systems. Says David Scott, business improvement director: “Electronic data collection from machines on the shop floor could potentially give a huge mass of data which can get you very confused, so you have to decide what you want to do with it before you collect it,” he says.
It isn’t always easy or obvious to identify what the business could achieve through integration, so various methodologies are available to help manufacturers. Atos Origin’s consultants use a number of techniques, including a benefit opportunity analysis: based on workshops and structured interviews, this pulls ideas together in a structured fashion to ensure that issues and opportunities are addressed, and prioritised.
It’s also worth noting that there’s likely to be a reluctance to get involved with integrating, since the expectation is invariably that projects will be vast, complicated and lengthy. But contrary to received wisdom, “People do tend to think they have to put in some walloping great system to get added value, but if you integrate to exploit the data you have in different systems you can get excellent paybacks very simply,” says Hopkinson.
For example, one manufacturer had been experiencing a problem with both quality and consistency of the output from one particular production process over a number of months. Eventually, someone thought to examine the amount of material it had been paying for as recorded by the ERP system, and to compare that with what the batch control system said had been used. The firm had been paying for much more material than the control system was recognising.
Quite simply, operators had been putting too much of a particular raw material into the production process because of a faulty flowmeter. A very basic level of integration – with batch volumes reported to ERP – would quickly have started engineers looking in the right place for the problem, possibly saving months of faulty and expensive production.
Turning down orders?
Another story from Hopkinson relates to a manufacturer that actually declined a major customer order because the ERP system believed there was insufficient material. There was ample inventory: the discrepancy was caused because the ERP system based its calculations on standard rather than actual consumption values, with its view of reality gradually going awry. A simple reconciliation – perhaps even once a day – is all the integration that would have been necessary.
These two examples illustrate very real gains achievable from the most straightforward of materials reconciliations. But for some plants, the nature of business dictates something far more ambitious.
At Rexam Beverage Can, which manufactures consumer packaging for the beverage, beauty, healthcare and food industries and is the world’s largest drinks can maker, both plant efficiency and product quality are crucially important because of the intensity of production. Manufacturing drinks cans is a high-speed process that operates round the clock, turning out millions of cans a day.
Wayne Flint, manufacturing systems manager for Rexam, says, “Like most plants, we can achieve efficiency in the 80—90% range, but to do better than that you need 100% of the information 100% of the time.” And that, says Flint, means “the underlying systems need to be timely and accurate and to deliver the information that the ERP system needs. If you put the investment into data acquisition for PLCs and automated quality control equipment, you have a building block to start from when interfacing with an ERP system.”
That means tracking virtually everything that happens. Rexam monitors every machine involved in the manufacturing process, right from the start to the final packaging stage. Stoppages are recorded together with the reason – flow control due to a lack of product, maintenance activity, or a machine fault. “You can then look from beginning to end of process, and de-
bottleneck the entire process by improving the efficiency of individual machines,” says Flint.
And every stoppage has to be recorded, even if it’s only a second. “If you have 3,600 stoppages of a second that’s the same as 60 stoppages of a minute. So if you really do need to know what’s holding up your process, then that’s the level of detail you need to go down to,” insists Flint.
Investment of the scale necessary in the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) and SFDC (shop floor data collection) systems to allow that level of integration does of course bring its rewards. Tangible benefits include increased production and decreased spoilage, leading to increased efficiency. “Your payback can be within a year,” says Flint. For Rexam, where quality is also a vital consideration, integration includes quality data too, with a Lighthouse Systems shop floor MES (manufacturing execution system) package being used for collecting data, running SPC (statistical process control) checks, feeding information back to the operator, and reporting.
Quality is also important for Bespak, and that means ensuring that manufactured product lies within specification. Another project Scott is considering is collecting information from SCADA systems that can be related to variability in the final product. “We need to identify those things we can record and then look at trends to see if there is significant movement in those settings,” explains Scott.
“To take moulding machines for example, there are cycle times and temperatures that we can monitor, and thus relate faults in the final product to faults in the settings on individual machines,” he explains.
Whatever the scale of integration, both Rexam and Bespak illustrate how initiatives must take the form of planned projects with well-defined business goals. Indeed, the early view of an all-singing, all-dancing wired factory is not merely unnecessary, but is very likely to be undesirable.
“I do remember seeing a planning system that was hard-linked into shop floor data collection and would re-jig the schedule in real time according to what’s happening on the shop floor,” says Hugh Williams, managing director, Hughenden Consultants. “But while there are bound to be variations during the day, whether you need to reschedule to that extent really is questionable!”
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Author
Brian Tinham
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