You probably heard the phrase crawl walk run.
The “crawl, walk, run” approach is a phased implementation strategy for introducing new technology or processes in manufacturing. It refers to the gradual progression from a basic, limited implementation to a more comprehensive and sophisticated one.
Here’s how it works in the context of manufacturing monitoring systems:
- Crawl: In the first phase, the focus is on getting the monitoring system up and running with the most critical metrics. This could involve installing sensors or other monitoring devices, setting up data collection and storage, and creating basic reports and dashboards to visualize the data.
- Walk: In the second phase, the focus is on expanding the monitoring system to cover more areas of the production process and collect more data. This could involve adding more sensors, integrating with existing systems, and developing more advanced reports and analytics to gain deeper insights into the data.
- Run: In the final phase, the monitoring system is fully integrated and optimized for the entire production process. The focus is on continuous improvement and refinement, leveraging the data to drive efficiency and quality improvements.
By following the “crawl, walk, run” approach, you can gradually introduce the monitoring system and build up to a comprehensive solution that provides real-time visibility and insights into the production process. This helps to minimize disruption, reduce risk, and ensure that the monitoring system is delivering real value to the business.
How Can You Use DDSES manufacturing monitoring system to do just that?
As an example, if you have a production line that includes the following stations.
- Nickel Coating booth
- Frame area
- Assembly area
You have multiple stations from each, and you are looking to get visibility into each one of these areas, to improve manufacturing flow, reduce work in process and increase employee involvement in your continuance improvement effort.
From employee feedback you see that the nickel coating booth is your bottleneck, you see that you get quality issues, and sometime need to send it back since you did not have enough coating material.
Crawl:
Speaking with digital display systems, you learn about a single device that can add sensors to your coating booth measure the amount of coating you use, and a scanner or RFID system that can allow automated input to the production monitoring and control system, letting the operator know the amount of coating they need to do to get the thickness they need. You want to track coating material batch number operator name, and job takt time.Your process have different coating times per product type. As an example a typical product will need to go into the coating bath 5 times, and for varying periods:
A. 15 seconds, for initial process,
B- 3 times for 1 minutes each and
C- 1 time for 30 sec. (Coating recipe)
DDS helps you create a list of all your product types with the recipe variables as well as engineering time per coating cycle.
This information will be carried with RFID in the coating Basket, and read by the system, thus allowing you to either automate the process or instruct the operator to perform the recipe as needed.In addition you setup email alerts, with downtime greater than XX minutes, and Encouraging buzzers to help operators input downtime reasons.
After a brainstorming session the chosen system below will provide the target, visibility, sharing and collaboration on the key metrics and alerts for downtime and quality.
OPERATING MODE ——– 1 SENSORS COUNTER, 1 X STROKE COUNT, 1 X IN BOOTH POSITION,
1 X EXIT POSITION, 1 X ENTRY SENSOR AND 1 X EXIT SENSOR2 OUTPUT RELAY FOR DOOR
OPEN AND CLOSE INDICATORS. USB RFID WITH TAG FUNCTIONALITY TO UPDATE GOAL ACTUAL PLUS
MOLD ATTRIBUTES. WIRELESS BAR-CODE SCANNER IN SECONDARY UNIT TO PROVIDE BATCH,
EMPLOYEE, DOWN TIME, AND QUALITY REASON. ETHERNET CONNECTIVITY IS A MUST
OPTIONAL: HISTORICAL DATA EXPORT, LIVE VIEW, AND SHIFT/BREAK SCHEDULE SETUP
3 MONTHS LATER:
You can generate reports, identify which products had accurate coating targets, and takt time targets. You are correcting the coating times . You are seeing which employees have better productivity than others and provide training to align your team, and reduce variability between operators.Armed with these learnings you start to improve the other paint stations, but now you want to give them the same capabilities and tracking information.
– It is time to add more monitoring and data collection devices.Walk:
6 months later your Nickel coating booth operations have improved, and you see a need to add monitoring devices to your frame areas. This area is fast paced, and you don’t have much variation between products, you want to measure run rate in addition to takt time, to keep everyone on their toes.DDS is recommending a system with control panel to track down time and rejects since it is a “dirty area” You align on the following system:
RUN:
After you have covered the two lines feeding the assembly area, you would like to know the stats in your assembly, you have seen a good improvement in your operations, performance throughput, and now it’s time to put it all together.
A discussion with DDS team, you come up with the following device and implementation:
- Connect the devices from coating, frame, and assembly, and track the WIP of frames and coated parts. This allows the devices to communicate with each other.
- Track the output of a complete assembly, and with every time a part is pulled reduce the electronic queue between the station
- Connect the devices to SQL server or any server that can use HTTP request to pull data.
- With 20 devices it is hard to collect all the data, and you would like to import the data every hour to your main SQL server.
- Since the DDS device comes prebuilt with API and is able to create a communication link between devices this process is achieved very quickly with minimal effort.
Now you know just need to start CRAWLING and get to the RUN stage with DDSES manufacturing monitoring system. Call us today for a free consultation.
