Engaging the production team to reduce idle time by >70% and improve OEE by 13%
The idea of using technology to track and improve production can sometimes seem daunting. Especially when a team has been using paper or spreadsheets for years, it can be hard to imagine how old habits might change to make use of real-time systems.
The CEO of a rubber manufacturer faced this dilemma: On the one hand, he was excited about the possibilities of using real-time visibility to help them improve their production efficiencies. At the same time, he was concerned about whether his small team would be willing to shift from paper and spreadsheets to a digital system, no matter how intuitive.
The CEO asked his Production Manager to spearhead the roll-out of Guidewheel’s real-time platform in the plant. The Production Manager carefully chose the most important machines - the Press Machines - on which to roll out the system first. He worked closely with the Guidewheel team to understand the load profiles of his machines and correctly configure the thresholds in the system to accurately reflect machine behavior. He knew he would always be busy on the factory floor, so having the system automatically and accurately track the machines would be a valuable “source of truth” about what was happening with the machines at all times.
As he thought about how to engage the rest of his team, he decided to start by engaging them with Guidewheel’s mobile functionality, rather than leading with the full power of the system. He configured alerts in the system so that as he carried his phone with him to the factory floor, he could rely on the alerts to prompt him to machine downtime or other issues where his attention was most required.
He made sure to configure the alerts for the most important problems so the moment an alert was sent, he could ask his maintenance team to prioritize diagnosing and addressing the issue to report back. With his phone in hand, he tagged each reason for downtime and the system automatically tracked and provided analysis on Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR). At the end of the day, he uploaded production data into the system to also track improvements in machine availability, performance, and quality of output.
Through the accurate, real-time data in the Guidewheel system, he could now clearly see that they were losing a lot more time on changeovers than they had previously known. Even better, he could quantify the losses down to the minute! He ran Pareto analysis to identify their top causes for downtime and effectively guided his team towards reducing the losses.
Excited to finally have accurate real-time data to work with, the Production Manager and his full team were able to identify multiple ways to streamline processes and cut down on inefficiencies, reducing their changeover times by 89% on their bottleneck Press machines.
Within just over a month, the average run-time on these critical press machines increased by 1.7-1.8 hours per day, and facility overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) increased by 13%. They are now using Guidewheel as the central source of truth not only for production tracking and reporting, but also for planning and cost accounting by the finance team.