Lean Manufacturing & Role of IT

In recent years, information technology (IT) has brought a range of improvements to the way companies are run. Systems today support everything from better decision making to greater efficiency in processes, from the back office to the customer-facing front line. But in manufacturing, these optimizations have not yet fully reached manufacturing operations. A synergistic amalgam of Lean principals and IT can address this.

That is not to say that sophisticated technology has not found its way to the shop floor—it has. But often, systems differ from operation to operation. Many are internally designed custom applications that are difficult to upgrade and maintain. In many cases, systems do not provide the full range of functionality needed in today’s manufacturing environments. What’s more, factory systems often are not integrated with each other, or with company enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. As a result, manufacturers find it difficult to keep data up to date and synchronized across operations. Factory managers lack the detailed, timely information and the tools needed to guide day-today operations—not to mention improvement programs such as Lean Manufacturing.

It is RSM Astute - Lemon Technologies' point of view that evolving technology is making those gaps unnecessary. Companies can move their factories forward with sophisticated sets of tools such as reporting applications, dashboards, scheduling systems and integration software, known collectively as manufacturing excellence systems (MES). With MES, companies can weave together factory systems, integrate them with ERPs, give factory operators and management better information about schedules and shop-floor processes, and make better use of automated information flows.

To get started, diamond companies need to know what today’s MES solutions offer, and the business case for implementing these technologies. Companies should question if their factory's current manufacturing IT landscape properly leverages today’s technology capabilities in order to provide them the required tools to become best in class.

Understanding how modern, mature MES solutions fit into companies helps bring greater efficiency, speed and precision to manufacturing, meeting customers’ needs more cost-effectively and accurately, and positioning themselves for high performance over the long term.

Assessing the benefits

The value of having accurate, timely information to support manufacturing may be self-evident. However, getting a more precise view of the business case for MES is not always so simple. Benefits can be difficult to measure: For example, if cycle days go down, is it due to the better insight into process cycles or performance benchmarks provided by MES or nature of the rough diamonds? Or, metrics such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) may actually appear to be lower than expected as a result of the MES’s automated collection of data, because operators are no longer able to “interpret” figures to their advantage. Faced with this complexity, many companies have skipped the formal evaluation phase after implementing MES and therefore cannot provide evidence of the improvements brought by MES.

In addition, our experience has shown that MES can bring benefits in terms of improved management of IT. The traditional approach, with its disparate, non-integrated technologies found across the factory, can lead to hidden IT costs that companies may not recognize. Such systems can also increase security and backup risks, because they are beyond the reach of the standards and methods of the central IT department. In essence, then, industrial processes—the manufacturer’s core business—may be dependent on systems that are vulnerable and not rigorously managed, and an outage could bring production to a standstill.

With MES, on the other hand, the manufacturing IT landscape becomes much easier to manage. Increased reliance on standard, integrated solutions means that IT departments have fewer types of technologies to support. Economies of scale can be brought to bear in both the purchase and maintenance of systems. And better monitoring and centralized control over IT makes it easier to ensure that effective security and business continuity processes are in place.

Functionality of today’s MES solutions

The first step toward achieving those benefits is to understand the functionality offered by today’s MES solutions. While companies often grasp the importance of MES as a software layer integrating ERP and shop-floor systems, many are less familiar with the range of functionality MES provides— functionality that can help manufacturers increase efficiency and productivity.

MES solutions are not a single “black box,” but rather an array of tools and technologies. Solutions differ, of course, but Lemon has created a general, high-level model illustrating the functional modules that manufacturers can expect to find in a typical MES implementation.

Factory model. This model provides centralized storage for production data, such as information about processes, departments, equipment, materials, personnel and related parameters. If appropriate, the factory model can be linked with other systems to enable actions such as the automatic synchronization of the Sales function, market price information etc. in the company’s ERP system. This central data storage reduces the need to track and coordinate data in various systems. It also supports the Right First Time manufacturing principle: consistent, centralized master data leads to less rework and waste, which indirectly results in shorter throughput time and fewer complaints.

Detailed production scheduling and simulation. Typically, the production in most diamond companies is based on the rough input without much correlation with the customer or sales demand. Hence, there is no such role as production planning. Detailed production scheduling modules of MES from Lemon provide the functionality needed to go beyond that basic approach. It typically enable companies to use load balancing, demand based planning, graphical representations etc. to develop and compare several plans to find the optimum schedule; to schedule with a focus on specific KPIs such as inventory costs or throughput times; to quickly adjust actual schedules in the event of disruptions or rush orders; and to understand the relationship between the production schedule and the distribution schedule. Implementing such a system can help shorten throughput times, increase efficiency and lower inventory costs. It may also lead to less-tangible advantages, such as quality improvements driven by reductions in stress among factory managers and workers.

Product definition management and production execution management. To do their jobs, operators on the shop floor need detailed instructions, such as product specifications, images of the Sarin or Mbox plans, information about customer-specific instructions related to specific orders, stone-specific instructions, and so on. Many companies have traditionally managed this information using paper forms, packets and other manual formats. MES solutions, on the other hand, provide such information to operators electronically, in real time. This enables them to quickly scan materials and, for example, determine whether they have the correct and optimal plan based on demand and value and so on. Often, MES systems can automatically send product-specific parameters to machines and devices, reducing the need for manual intervention and reducing errors and time in the process. Such functionality helps avoid waste and rework, which indirectly shortens throughput time, helps reduce recalls and increases customer satisfaction.

Mobile solutions, smart devices, wireless. Often, workers and managers move around in production facilities to read data from sensors and take samples, and record that information on paper forms. But today, smart devices and wireless technologies make it possible to automatically read sensors and detect problems such as calibration data and stone data. In situations where actual inspections are still necessary, mobile solutions, such as smart phones and Wi-Fi-enabled tablets, can provide instructions for workers and managers about the sequence in which they have to collect data and when to take which stones. The data they collect can be input into the mobile device and instantly made available to a central control room and/or sales desks. Analyses of the data can be used to quickly develop adjustments to the appropriate process settings, which in turn can be immediately provided to the MES screen in the manager's room. The use of such mobile solutions can help reduce risks while providing real-time insight into processes, allowing production to respond quickly when changes are required.

 

Electronic Books. Electronic Books are “flat” databases that can archive huge amounts of data for a very long time. The purpose of the database is that Current process results can be easily compared to those of, say, last week or even last year. Thus, these are key to process optimization and can have a positive impact on quality and throughput. Although most diamond companies have historical databases in use, many are not yet using one at every location where it is appropriate or the old data is not relevant or is partly deleted or rendered non usable. Moreover, older systems often lack sound reporting capabilities, so the data is left hidden in local silos. And in many cases, there are several different softwares in place, which is a disadvantage from a systems maintenance point of view.

Dashboard. As in other areas of business, people working in factories can benefit from business-intelligence functionality. However, to be effective in a production setting, such systems need to provide information in real time and at a high level of detail. Managers and Operators simply do not have time to scroll through various screens and examine different fields to find information; they have to concentrate on the physical process. Thus, it is essential to provide these personnel the exact data that they need in a timely, user-friendly fashion. That is the role of the factory dashboard—providing the appropriate information in the appropriate format at the appropriate time to the appropriate users. Dashboards can provide real-time information, often collected through interfaces with other modules or distributed control / decision support systems. This information is presented in different views to different audiences using a single data source. For example, workers may need to see the actual production and their incentives/penalties while  managers might need an overview of the cycle days, urgent demands, process loss, yields etc. With the dashboard’s real-time insight into the status of production orders, disruptions, quality issues, and so forth, companies can be in position to respond to events before they become serious issues—helping to bring down the cost of quality and increase efficiency.

Reports and genealogy. MES solutions provide standard reports about process loss, production, productivity etc. A key advantage is that all reports stem from the same source—a combination of automatically collected data from programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and DSS, and information manually entered into the MES during the production process by operators. As a result, the company is working with a “single version of the truth.” Data can be fed automatically into the ERP system, helping upper management feel confident that it is working with valid information, and enabling decision makers across the organization to focus on improving performance, rather than rechecking data. An MES also opens the door to using standard report formats for all the factories in a network to support benchmarking efforts. And compared to an ERP system, it can provide far more detailed tracking and tracing to strengthen pipeline integrity.

Workflow management. Workflow management functionality is an effective tool for coordinating processes involving several departments and several systems. For example, when a production department has produced a lot, quality control has to inspect that lot. Based on what is checked by the QC department, the sales team has to prepare the for distribution. The longer it takes for departments to inform each other about the completion of their task, the longer the throughput time will be. Workflow management can shorten the lag time of handoffs, which in turn can have a significant impact in terms of shortening lead times. In addition, the system’s “forcing” of employees to execute specific steps can help improve quality and compliance.