Intelligent and Faster Manufacturing Processes
Whether referred to as digital transformation, industrial internet of things and smart manufacturing IoT, or Industry 4.0, manufacturers integrate readily available technologies across all areas of their business to help them realize significant benefits across the enterprise, including increased agility and effectiveness of assets, people, materials, and energy. Connecting sensors, instruments, and devices with other enterprise applications allow for quicker, smarter, and even autonomous decision-making. For manufacturers, time is money and with more intelligent and faster processes in place, you can reduce the risk of unplanned downtime and operational inefficiencies.
Capabilities with Digital Transformation in Manufacturing
By taking advantage of IoT trends in manufacturing, NeoMatrix has enabled companies to increase throughput, uptime, and performance while reducing costs. Here are a couple of customer use cases:
- A raw material silo can be connected to the manufacturer's ordering system and automatically place an order for more raw materials based on real-time demand. Taking it a step further this information can be provided directly to your vendors to alert them to deliver the required quantities rather than waiting for an order.
- Connecting equipment to a CMMS application can reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF). Equipment faults can automatically generate a maintenance work order sending a technician to assess the equipment. Real-time meter readings such as cycles or run hours can be used to generate Preventative Maintenance work orders rather than time.
Customer Use Case: Lucid Demonstrates Digital Transformation in Automotive Manufacturing
As the first greenfield or purpose-built electronic vehicle (EV) factory in North America, Lucid AMP-1 in Casa Grande, Arizona, is outfitted with the world’s most advanced production line equipment. Standardized on platforms for plant floor control (Allen Bradley & Siemens PLCs), MES (Rockwell), CMMS (FIIX) and ERP (SAP) systems, as the implementation of these platforms progressed, it became apparent that a gap existed with their existing software platform implementations.
If Lucid could eliminate this gap in the software stack the company could have what they wanted, which was for their manufacturing processes to be highly automated and coupled with integrated industrial software platforms, providing access to production, quality, and performance data to the entire manufacturing team. With NeoMatrix’s MES (manufacturing execution system) experience, we utilized the Ignition software platform from Inductive Automation and OEE Module from Sepasoft to create a solution that could eliminate the gap and:
- Reduce energy costs by connecting machinery to real-time production schedules. Equipment and utilities can be automatically warmed up and set to standby mode based on demand.
- Eliminate paper with a digital solution.
- Replace clipboards with tablets or kiosks and digital forms to save time and increases accuracy. Paper based forms require later transfer of that data to a digital system or sharing physical copies with others. These redundant tasks increase the risk for data inaccuracy, wastes time and delays access to the data.
- Implement electronic work instruction systems that provide benefits to both frontline personnel and managers. Workers waste time by sifting through long, and often out of date, manuals searching for relevant information. Managers waste time updating and distributing them manually.
- Provide better decision support through analytics enabling real-time, learning-based decision making. Most manufacturers have been collecting large volumes of data in plant historians for years. Utilizing off the shelf tools, these datasets can be mined to discover hidden opportunities in your manufacturing process.
- Deliver real-time feedback to plant floor supervisors and operators in the form of Andon dashboards. Data such as operator help calls, line status, and actual production vs. target information provide contextual information to help plant floor personnel focus on the important tasks.
Industry 4.0 Manufacturing Increasing the Competitiveness of Industrial Manufacturing
While the promise of the digital transformation journey is exciting, weeding through the IoT trends in manufacturing and finding a place to start can be overwhelming. NeoMatrix can help cut through the industry jargon and help you achieve quick wins, shortening your time to value. As dictated in our proven process we will start with discovery. We evaluate your processes and business systems and interview your team to figure out a place to start and how your own Industry 4.0 manufacturing strategy can help increase your competitive position in the market.
