Company Impovement: Quality, productivity, Efficiency, costs, ...

userxyz · Aug 28, 2009

Hi,

I have a question about improvement with Automation. Let me explain you why... In times like these it's only the strongest company's that can survive, in our company they are willing to invest to improve things and to remain the leader in the products that we make. All the machines that we have are machines builded by the engineering team, our department. Each machine does something in the construction pocess of the product, but are stand-alone machines, each with an own HMI device, own PLC and so on.

There is no network connection to most machines, no OPC, SCADA, whatever. The operators are basically boss over their machine.
We as an engineering department are must search for improvements on the machines, process, costs, Quality of the products, Efficiency, and so on...

We are an engineering team (machine builders) working for external and for internal. The improvement is offcourse for our production department internally.

At the moment we started with a project for energy saving. A line with many pumps (start / triangle) that will be modified to frequency inverters. We will regulate the pumps depending on the line speed and we will check where the products are in the line, so that we can stop the pumps when we can. So this is a costs saver.

Are their persons that also upgraded their company with some sort of technology so that they improve their company is some way ?

In a previous company I worked for we had a Scada system like WinCC. Now that 7.0 is out I will go to an info session in 2 weeks. I was thinking to install a WinCC... can this be a good improvement ? The concept is: connecting as much machines as possible on the company's network and supervise the machines with alarmlogging, checking if the don't run, why they don't run, even let the operator log in (user login) so that we know every detail of the machine. Should this improve ? I know some folks are in need of sigarets and they stop the machine for several short periods of time / day.

Other Ideas ?

PLCMentor · Aug 28, 2009

I think some type of SCADA system monitoring several lines is a great idea. We have many clients that have that setup. It allows for monitoring downtime, runtime, alarms, trending, etc. Over time additional functionality can be added as you require.

userxyz · Aug 28, 2009

...

:handball:Okay, but it is also a big cost, is it interesting enough, can we expect paybak because of less downtime, can you motivate your answer a little more please ? It's not that easy to come to my boss and say: WE NEED SCADA...

There is only 1 machine connected to the company's network at the moment. We do some csv logging to a server, very rough data, doesn't say anything, only to me and IT guys, but it's unuseful to most people, I think the data of a scada system has to be accesable to all people in the company, then we can evaluate it all together.

...

PLCMentor said:
I think some type of SCADA system monitoring several lines is a great idea. We have many clients that have that setup. It allows for monitoring downtime, runtime, alarms, trending, etc. Over time additional functionality can be added as you require.

leitmotif · Aug 28, 2009

PLCMentor said:
I think some type of SCADA system monitoring several lines is a great idea. We have many clients that have that setup. It allows for monitoring downtime, runtime, alarms, trending, etc. Over time additional functionality can be added as you require.

Monitoring and metrics and all that are great tools - if they are used properly. if you are only going to use downtime (PM breakage etc) as a means to beat up on maintenance it is not worth the money. If you are going to use it to figure out why one machine is broke more often than another AND FIX PROBLEM instead of throwing another band aid on gangrene great. You may conclude machine is too old just worn out and suitable for scrap and then decide to live with it or cut a purchase order. Either decision would be a good one but do you really need all this monitoring to do it?

If all this monitoring only results in piles of paper with fancy charts and metrics that only collect dust on some managers desk for sure it is a waste of paper, money, time and materials.

How did we ever run factories keep machines running and win wars without it? Are we getting computers to do our thinking for us (in some ways I do for sure - I am not sure if I can do slip stick anymore and I have doubts about riding a bike)?

Dan Bentler

PLCMentor · Aug 28, 2009

I am not sure whether you can justify a SCADA system for one line or not. It really depends on the line. I tend to look at cost justifications for systems such as this. If you know roughly how much downtime you have and can see a solution the SCADA can provide, then you can usually put a number to it. I am always surprised at how big that number usually is. Same with logging certain variables. If you can use that information to solve or prevent problems then you can put numbers to that also. Only you can look at your system and see where the money is leaking out. Dan is correct in that just collecting information to collect information is usually useless. You need to find a package that allows easy queries and reports so it doesnt take a week to be able to pull the data from your system when you need it. Wonderware has a pretty good product for this but they are proud of it. It has always paid off where we decided to put it. I am not sure what WinCC has for data reporting.

Thim · Aug 28, 2009

Hi Combo,
Maybe it is interessting to check if you can speed op the machines with killing death times in the program, ok it will not affect alot but image that you could produce 1 piece an hour more then normally, then image that it is a car euhm then you would produce 8760 more cars a year. I'm sure you can sell this to your boss and have some free time to program a game or so

I do this alot in our process, last year we sold an installation with 1ton capacity an hour, the customer allways complained, the machine doesn't reach that capacity we put a logging system on it and it was correct we only had 700Kg an hour. After fooling a bit with the timers for a day i got 3,6tons an hour out of it. Can you image how mad the customer was knowing you could get 3,6tons and i screwed it back to 1,5tons

markopo · Aug 29, 2009

I have to answer.
Yeap someone said that could be a good tool a good axe for a maintenance.
To beat them for .... anything. I'm working in maintenance, for some reasons I see that management don't want to "settle down" this system.
There is no problems with a net conn beetwen CPU's and SCADA computers. SCADA can be reachable for any divisions where info about downtime (spark-downtimes, about MTBF, reaction time of maintenace, times of repairs, pushing machines to auto mode again etc. etc.).
Can anyone explain me why idea of total- I mean TOTAL measurement ( micro-stops, real downtime, operators breaks, operators faults, planning faults,setting machines faults, factor of sickness through out crew of operators ( SIC ! - it's important) in some firms is not ( I say more delicate as I can) taked seriously ???

userxyz · Aug 30, 2009

I was thinking at the following things I can do with it:
- supervise the operators
- faults that happens too much, try to improve the machine
- supervise the maintenance
- making trendings, to prove the improvement and to show all the operators, maintenance, etc... that we actually measure thing. I think it will motivate operators to work harder too...

leitmotif said:
Monitoring and metrics and all that are great tools - if they are used properly. if you are only going to use downtime (PM breakage etc) as a means to beat up on maintenance it is not worth the money. If you are going to use it to figure out why one machine is broke more often than another AND FIX PROBLEM instead of throwing another band aid on gangrene great. You may conclude machine is too old just worn out and suitable for scrap and then decide to live with it or cut a purchase order. Either decision would be a good one but do you really need all this monitoring to do it?

If all this monitoring only results in piles of paper with fancy charts and metrics that only collect dust on some managers desk for sure it is a waste of paper, money, time and materials.

How did we ever run factories keep machines running and win wars without it? Are we getting computers to do our thinking for us (in some ways I do for sure - I am not sure if I can do slip stick anymore and I have doubts about riding a bike)?

Dan Bentler

userxyz · Aug 30, 2009

We make stand-alone prototype machines. After the optimizing stage, the machine should run at max speed like calculated by the engineeringsmanager. Improve the speed in the program is allmost unpossible, the only thing that can be done is rebuild some things in the line... for example::: we have a machine that runs at 18s / productcycle, the machine can run at 14s, but the manipulator isn't fast enough,,, sow, the only thing that can be done is placing a kuka robot for example... but, these are way too expensive improvements at the moment

Thim said:
Hi Combo,
Maybe it is interessting to check if you can speed op the machines with killing death times in the program, ok it will not affect alot but image that you could produce 1 piece an hour more then normally, then image that it is a car euhm then you would produce 8760 more cars a year. I'm sure you can sell this to your boss and have some free time to program a game or so

I do this alot in our process, last year we sold an installation with 1ton capacity an hour, the customer allways complained, the machine doesn't reach that capacity we put a logging system on it and it was correct we only had 700Kg an hour. After fooling a bit with the timers for a day i got 3,6tons an hour out of it. Can you image how mad the customer was knowing you could get 3,6tons and i screwed it back to 1,5tons

Thim · Aug 30, 2009

Nice!!
This is totally different from our installations/programs.
First it is not a standalone machine but a total process.
We have so many timers that no one takes the time to optimize them as long as you reach the requirments, if this would be done every time we would notice that half of the installations is over calculated.

Combo said:
We make stand-alone prototype machines. After the optimizing stage, the machine should run at max speed like calculated by the engineeringsmanager. Improve the speed in the program is allmost unpossible, the only thing that can be done is rebuild some things in the line... for example::: we have a machine that runs at 18s / productcycle, the machine can run at 14s, but the manipulator isn't fast enough,,, sow, the only thing that can be done is placing a kuka robot for example... but, these are way too expensive improvements at the moment

userxyz · Aug 30, 2009

Scada is mostly used in process industry...,Our company with many many stand-alone machines in a building, with all having different tasks/products, it's not really necessary to have a Scada application, but we all must think about improvements of all-kind. Even planning and so on. WinCC is a good application indeed, but if there is nobody looking at it with the leaning of iprovement, then it's better to keep working like we do... The reason that we need to improve is to stay markets number one... if we do nothing we will loose first place thanks to asia.

The drying-painting line in our company is a process-line, the only machine that is not a stand-alone machine.
We will place inverters. We can save lots of energy, and it can be controlled from office via smartservice. These things are very interesting because we improve costs...

It's not easy to know where we must improve.

Thim said:
Nice!!
This is totally different from our installations/programs.
First it is not a standalone machine but a total process.
We have so many timers that no one takes the time to optimize them as long as you reach the requirments, if this would be done every time we would notice that half of the installations is over calculated.

Thim · Aug 30, 2009

Idd we have a scada, not Wincc but a external company has design a scada system that works on a browser. Pretty nice stuff.

Combo said:
Scada is mostly used in process industry...,Our company with many many stand-alone machines in a building.

userxyz · Aug 30, 2009

wincc

wincc 7.0 can do such things too

Thim said:
Idd we have a scada, not Wincc but a external company has design a scada system that works on a browser. Pretty nice stuff.

Thim · Aug 30, 2009

http://www.spiromatic.com/images/stories/downloads/spido2E.pdf

userxyz · Aug 31, 2009

looks nice

looks nice.

Thim said:
http://www.spiromatic.com/images/stories/downloads/spido2E.pdf

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