This is what no one tells you about Smart Manufacturing

Walk inside General Motors or Raytheon production facilities today. You will feel like you have stepped inside a clock. You can almost hear the ticking.

• With the workforce of 30,000+ robots and 180,000 people, General Motors (GM) is producing 27,400 cars per day. The secret ingredient is ‘avoiding unscheduled downtime’ by connecting about a quarter of its factory robots to the internet.
• Raytheon Corp. implemented a system which monitors even its assembly operations down to the turn of a screw. It’s like if a screw turns 14 times but is only turned 12, it is too loose. If it turns 15 times, then it is too tight. If a screw is not turned the right number of times, production stops and the computer dashboard flashes an error message.

The list can just go on about how much ‘smarter’ factories are becoming today.

“You don’t create the Internet of Things as a stand-alone. Its value will come when it connects to all parts of the organization. That will lead to the transformation of the entire organization.” — Umeshwar Dayal, Senior Vice President and Senior Fellow (Information Research) at Hitachi America Ltd, Global Center for Social Innovation, North America.

1. Equipment

When we think of textile mills or automotive assembly plants, pharmaceutical products manufacturers or defense contractors; inadvertently we first think of machinery. But as the adage goes, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s why factories that become smarter today measure three things about their equipment: availability, performance, and quality because they together determine overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). An OEE score of 100% means you are manufacturing with 100% Quality (only good parts), 100% Performance (as fast as possible), and 100% Availability (no stop time).

OEE is the gold standard for measuring manufacturing productivity. Now the question is can IoT help my production facility to take manufacturing productivity at its peak? The following table will help you to understand, “how?”

“Preventive maintenance is worth $0.33 a square foot with a return on investment of 545%.” — Wei Lin Koo, Vice President with JLL’s strategic consulting group.

2. Workforce

‘Get more in less time’ is on every manufacturer’s lips. Gone are the days when most management teams used to set goals and strategies to empower workforce to be more productive. Today, with IoT, industrial spaces around the world now blend workforce with intelligent machines that work collaboratively and dynamically to increase efficiency and productivity. Two years back, in a human-machine study conducted by MIT researchers at a BMW factory, it was shown that the collaboration between humans and robots reduced human idle time by 85%. There are chiefly three ways in which IoT technology can enhance workforce efficiency and productivity:

3. Supply Chain Management

To achieve a truly successful outcome of the smart factory, what happens within the four walls of a factory needs to link with what happens across the entire supply chain network. Therefore, shifting from linear, sequential supply chain operations to an interconnected system of supply operations could lay the basis for smart factories to compete in the future. By leveraging the IoT, executives of your manufacturing facility will be able to see where performance is weak and where it’s strong, allowing them to make smart strategic decisions. There are three key stages which help manufacturers to make smarter, more responsive, and better informed decisions about their supply chains.

Ultimately, the application of intelligence at the factory level will allow manufacturers to do more than just upgrading their equipment and eliminate inefficiencies to increase their operational effectiveness (like GM). The ability to use the data will also give the freedom to manufacturers to make the right strategic decisions (like Tesco), to reinvent their business model (like Raytheon) and to maintain a competitive advantage in an ever-more complicated and rapidly shifting manufacturing market of the future.

Though 76% of manufacturers either have a smart factory initiative that is ongoing or are working on formulating it, only 14% of companies are satisfied with their level of success. — Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Institute (DTI).

To be satisfied with your investment in a smart factory capability, you can surely rely on our expertise.

Originally published at www.softwebsolutions.com on May 25, 2018.