Across industry, the factory is increasingly viewed as an asset to be squeezed. Indicative of this viewpoint, “Key aspects of how to evaluate the performance of food and beverage packaging line operations are reduced inventories, lower end-to-end cycle times, and higher asset utilization,” explained Xavier Marfa, Food & Beverage Business Development Manager, Industry Solutions, at Schneider Electric.
“Add to this increasing customer demands for new packaging materials that require more changeovers and faster replenishment cycles, coupled with a general lack of visibility into market supply and demand risks,” and you see a clear need to move toward a culture of empowerment for operations and engineering personnel.
Key to this empowerment, however, is the automation of mundane or manual data collection paperwork tasks, which are often required of packaging line operators, engineers and managers which hurt efficiency and operational agility.
“典型的工厂运行24/7，并使用Excel管理自己的生产数据。简单的数据收集工具没有链接。“同时，生产量正在稳步增长，因此人们必须更快或更有效地工作以满足需求。例如，机器运营商必须处理与生产，性能，可用性和质量细节相关的所有报告。本文工作使他们分散了他们的核心机器操作任务，导致记录的数据质量值得怀疑。”
Likewise, production supervisors have to get purchase orders from the ERP system, manually assign orders to lines, and then validate completed orders. Engineers, who should be focused on analyzing and eliminating production losses, have to gather production data from the last 24 hours before doing any analyses. Meanwhile, managers are not getting timely or accurate data from operations and engineering, so as a result, make less–than-optimal or even bad decisions.
“To break this cycle, most companies frame the question as: Should we hire more people or invest in more machines?” noted Lee, who pointed out that a more cost-effective answer lies in managing their production data better.
“Manufacturing packaging lines produce high volumes of data, which means that operators and engineers have to swim through massive amounts of data—often in unstandardized reports—to find the information they need,” Lee said. “But if you have a single platform for data entry and reporting so that the data can be presented in the way users need it, anytime and anywhere, then that changes the whole scenario.”
Lee highlighted how行性能套件—a turnkey OEE solution just launched—is a platform for work order execution and real-time data acquisition that provides visibility into production equipment use as well as enhanced reporting tools for each role in manufacturing packaging line operations.
“Line Performance Suite differs from standard OEE software in that it can drill down into root causes, run reports and analytics on large volumes of data without impacting MES, is model-based driven by operating best practices, and features an open and easy user interface for form creation and modification,” Lee said. “Plus it’s extensible with other Schneider Electric software products. It’s also easy to install and configure because of its model-driven, wizard-based configuration.”
Lee also noted that, although Line Performance Suite features eight pre-defined, standard reports, these reports can be modified as needed. The pre-defined reports are based on Lean Manufacturing/Total Productive Maintenance practices to highlight utilization by timeline and entity, mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), quality, availability, performance, and event analysis.
With Line Performance Suite’s common platform for data entry—which can be automated—information that has to be keyed in manually can be standardized for ease of operator and data consistency. “All data in the software is time sliced, categorized and consolidated by Wonderware Intelligence so that it is ready to be presented appropriately in a variety reports,” Lee said. “This allows operators to focus on production tasks rather than spending so much time on data gathering, cleanup and input.”
For supervisors, Line Performance Suite features automated purchase order handling for central management of work orders. “Data can be viewed on dashboards or in detailed reports,” said Lee, so that supervisors can spend more time focusing on shift coordination optimization.
“现在,每天早上,生产经理可以我et with everyone and have all the data needed ready for review, with no time spent digging through data,” Lee said. “This means that engineers can spend all day on continuous improvement activities and managers can better focus on strategic decisions to improve factory operations.”
通过模型驱动的最佳实践方法，用户可以实现可持续的持续改进结果。Lee说：“由于Line Performance Suite是由工作流程驱动的，以指导用户，因此可以将改进操作的更改嵌入到流程中以停止错误的做法。”“此外，最佳实践可以在工厂中很容易共享，因为Line Performance Suite可以实现流程标准化和治理，从而通过其基于角色的模型来增强，该模型明确定义了每个人如何参与改进过程。”
