We were called into a factory because they wanted an Industry 4.0 solution for monitoring their machinery. The company was producing simple parts from about 50 machines that were quality checked and assembled in another part of the factory.
We asked them what they wanted to achieve. They said that they had been given an instruction by head office to use technology, to help make the factory more efficient. They needed to dashboard to be able to see what’s going on at any time.
They wanted measure operating equipment efficiency known as OEE. OEE is a function of available time, the time your machine operates and the quality of materials that is produced. So, 100% OEE would mean that the machine is working all day nonstop and producing perfect quality materials. World Class is 85% OEE. In most businesses we see that 50 to 60% OEE is normal. By improving your OEE you can do two things – either make more parts per hour or increase the variation of parts that you can make during the day.
We asked them how they measured their output. They explained that they would count the number of finished goods produced at the end of the shift. They did not measure machine output.
We suggested they put in a manual system first so they could start measuring the efficiency of their machines. This would mean making a very simple chart to put on each machine that showed hourly output against planned output as well as a measure of quality of parts.
They explained that they measured the quality at a different part of the factory before assembly and packing. We told them that they would need to move the quality inspection to the machine if they’re going to measure OEE. If they measured the quality of the parts as they came out of the machine they could also fix problems at source rather than having to deal with a factory full of bad parts later. They said they did not have enough quality inspectors to go to each machine. We proposed that they train machine operators to do simple quality checks as parts come out of the machines? They said that would not be possible. We were beginning to feel resistance to change.
Each machine had a counter and the operator could write down the number of parts produced per hour by multiplying the cycle count of each machine by the number of parts that it would produce each cycle. We were told that that couldn’t be done because an engineer would be needed to do that calculation.
Why would we need an engineer. Can’t your employees use a calculator to multiply two numbers together?
We were then told that even without an engineer the machine operators couldn’t do that job because they were temporary labour and they didn’t have time to train them properly for either quality or how to use a calculator.
The business was not willing to improve the way it worked by being flexible – they just wanted to have a silver bullet solution.
We explained that they needed to put in a process where they would review what was happening in every area of the factory every day with the production team, engineering, maintenance, safety, supply chain and quality teams. They said they didn’t have such a meeting and didn’t see the need to have a meeting because the dashboard would give them the answers.
The problem was that they weren’t prepared to make the changes necessary to improve and measure efficiency, and understand what needed to be done to fix problems before putting in an industry 4.0 solution. Lots of data is great, but you must know what to do with it. Having a dashboard will show you the efficiency of your machines at any given time but that will not help you solve the problems of low efficiency and quality.
Problems are solved by people, and unless you have a system in place to do that, putting in the technology is going to be a complete waste of time. Unless you are ready to make big changes to the way you work, technology will just end up as a wasted cost.
There is no silver bullet.
