How Guidewheel can drive continuous improvement.
Improve your team’s production process with Guidewheel’s plug-and-play FactoryOps platform, which allows teams to automatically track their uptime, downtime, cycle time, and overall production while pinpointing root causes of inefficiencies to continuously improve.
Penn Color, a manufacturer of additives used to color plastics, uses Guidewheel to drive continuous improvement across the board. Read the full story in Industry Week.
Start by using Guidewheel to increase accuracy
No human is perfect. As operators manually entering data can fall victim to error, having an accurate shared source of truth gets everyone on the same page about where to improve:
Inaccurate data tracking skews overall production reports. Use Guidewheel to get a source of truth that is the truth.
Penn Color was surprised to discover their manual tracking processes were reporting inaccurately. As noted in the IndustryWeek article, “The trustworthiness of data captured by the new system gradually became clear. Material planning analysts took handwritten reports from the traditional system and reports from the IoT system onto the floor to ask operators whether they remembered specific events. The operators often agreed that the IoT system provided more accurate data.
Guidewheel’s real-time tracking collects the most accurate data so your business can know where your productivity and efficiency truly are, and quantify the room you have to improve.
Knowing the accurate OEE of your operations can guide and support your business decisions on and off the plant floor.
By using Guidewheel, Penn Color increased utilization by 30-35% across their US plants
Along with tracking and managing utilization metrics, Penn Color found they were able to remove underutilized legacy machines that were not performing up to standards, also achieving a 3% reduction in maintenance costs.
Unlock growth with real-time alerting
Operators should be able to focus their full attention on running their machines, and shouldn’t have to waste time on when and how to alert the team if a machine is down when it shouldn’t be.
Guidewheel’s real-time alerting has been part of the full system that has allowed Penn Color to unlock a greater growth potential by getting more out of their existing team and equipment.
Before Guidewheel, Penn Color found they lost valuable time from delayed incident reporting.
Now, they use Guidewheel to automate the process with real-time tagging and alerting so it is not up to memory when and why an incident started/finished.
Using the Alerts feature within the Guidewheel platform is straightforward. The system automatically flags issues as they happen, with operators providing context if and when desired in their workflows.
Guidewheel allows teams to automate alerts with email and SMS messaging to designated supervisors.
Start improving as quickly as possible with easy install
Guidewheel can be installed in a matter of days and will instantly start capturing the data.
Manufacturers like Penn Color are able to interpret the data and make improvements in their operation in a matter of weeks.
Manually troubleshooting can hold back production and revenue. With Guidewheel’s easy install and implementation you can diagnose and treat these issues with the urgency they deserve.
Guidewheel’s interface is easy to use and gives you the actionable insights you need
As they track all machine data, Penn Color uses Guidewheel’s built in Pareto Analysis feature to find the highest ROI continuous improvement opportunities
Guidewheel is both user and machine friendly. You can trust it with your newest operators and legacy machines, as it works on machines of any age, make, or model and is designed for intuitive use on the plant floor.
Wondering if Guidewheel will work for your team?
Guidewheel hardware can be installed in any factory—big or small, old or new—in a day.
We offer 100% virtual launch.