The Many Faces of Manufacturing Efficiency
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Original Article, NOVEMBER 2013 |
The Many Faces of Manufacturing EfficiencyNorth American plants are becoming more efficient. While the term lean manufacturing once had a very specific meaning at plants like Toyota with its quality circles, now the term has come to mean any technique that brings efficiency and optimization to the manufacturing process. This goal is to improve throughput while reducing waste, to improve uptime while reducing energy consumption, to improve safety while reducing work stoppages. Gains in manufacturing efficiency and automation means that logistics play a larger role in choosing a location for a plant. If your manufacturing is efficient in Ohio, you will be less likely to locate your plant in China. What you save in cheap overseas labor will be eaten up by shipping. The idea of keeping your manufacturing close to home works only if you can make sure your processes are very lean. We鈥檙e seeing new progress on a wide range of plant processes. Less hardware and more software One of the trends we鈥檙e seeing in lean processes is an increase of reliance on software and the trimming down of hardware. 鈥淗ow can you do more with less? If you have more functions with one controller instead of manycontrollers, you鈥檒l be more efficient,鈥 Graham Harris, president of Beckhoff Automation, told Design News. 鈥淵ou can control a machine with three axes with one controller. The synchronization is easier with one controller because all the data is on one CPU. That also saves cabinet space.鈥 The savings in hardware can include everything from PCs and controllers to wires. 鈥淵ou have less hardware and more software now. That鈥檚 efficient,鈥 Harris told us. 鈥淵ou have only one cable, while traditionally, it was dual cables. So you have less material. Safety is now integrated into the same Ethernet bus as the controller. That offers savings in set-up.鈥 Safety and simulation Simulation has also brought efficiency to plant processes. Changes can now be worked out in simulation before you turn on machines that might crash into each other if you don鈥檛 work out the configuration ahead of time in software. 鈥淭echnology also means I鈥檓 not rewiring when I make a change. I鈥檓 changing the code instead. It鈥檚 configuration, not design and rewiring,鈥 said McDermott. The simulation means changes can be made both accurately and quickly. 鈥淥ne factor is time-to-market. Simulation allows machine builders to minimizing time on the machine,鈥 McDermott told us. 鈥淵ou can spend your programming time up front. That minimizes time on the machine.鈥 Employee buy-in Another way to make sure efficiency really takes hold in a plant is to get employee buy-in. You get the buy-in by involving employees in the efficiency process. 鈥淚t starts with getting people to understand there is always room for improvement. You have to embrace all employees,鈥 Jim Coshnitzke, a manager at , told Design News. 鈥淵ou get people in production, supervision, and management, and you map the current cycle. You model it and get input from everyone.鈥 鈥淭hat input from everyone can be as little as changing the work set-up to make production movements more efficient. It may not seem like much when you save a handful of seconds, but they can add up to real savings. You look at what steps you can change. You rearrange tools to make movements up and it saves hours,鈥 said Coshnitzke. 鈥淵ou work on those ideas. But in order to get the employees鈥 ideas, you have to have employee buy-in.鈥 The employee input can be as little as saving movement or as large as changing the fundamental manufacturing process. 鈥淚n one instance, we compared batch to process. We had been doing batch. So we took all of the employees and took them through a Lego exercise,鈥 said Coshnitzke.鈥淲e did batch, and then we did flow. We saw a 300-percent improvement with flow. Everyone was involved, so we have the buy-in to switch from bath to flow.鈥 听 |
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