How to Drive Continuous Improvement Without Negatively Impacting Production Employees Productivity

Do you ever have new customer’s tour your manufacturing operations?  Sure you do.  You are demonstrating to them your capabilities, quality, attention to detail and your ability to deliver product to them on time.  In the world we live in today, manufacturing is being driven to support their internal and external customers with accurate and timely information that truly represents REALITY.

Accurate & timely information is key to delivering on continuous improvement programs, but burdening production operators with capturing data rather than producing quality on-time parts, is not the answer.  Memex Automation’s MERLIN Solution can deliver these capabilities in a commercial off-the-shelf solution, deployed using best practices to deliver the information to your customers that will have them become repeat buyers.

Continue reading to learn how utilizing the Internet of Things (IoT) in manufacturing will solve this data collection problem.

How to Drive Continuous Improvement Without Negatively Impacting Production Employees Productivity

Does your organization have concrete strategies for operational efficiencies, with connections to your manufacturing machines, utilizing Internet of Things (IoT) concepts?  The disruptive pressures from management and competition along with the availability of state of the art technology can deliver operational improvement from 10% – 50% TODAY.

MERLIN, from Memex Automation, delivers the comprehensive data connections to all of your equipment and delivers actionable information for your operational stakeholders (e.g. management, production, engineering and operators).

A recent survey of North American manufacturers indicates that operational efficiency is most frequently cited for short term projects.  Cost cutting (44%), employee productivity improvements (46%) and asset optimization (46%) are seen as most likely to benefit.

Connected devices and the data they generate are delivering new ways for manufacturers to predict maintenance requirements, improve production yields on their shop floors, and increase uptimes in their factories.  All of these factors combined are leading to tremendous growth opportunities for manufacturers.  The IoT is lowering the costs of goods sold allowing manufacturers to take those savings and reinvest them into their business, their research and development, and most importantly, their people.  IoT growth will lead to job growth in the manufacturing sector, so see how you can take advantage of this today – http://www.memexoee.com/company/the-last-metre/

So what is the advantage of machine versus operator generated data/information for a manufacturer?

Let’s start with a real world example.  A manufacturer of medical devices had their machine operators keep track of when, how long and why a machine was down.  The Lean Team knew that the operator was not able to capture the accurate down-time (many times 500% more than was manually recorded) and the process of manually documenting down-time reasons was distracting the operator from always producing quality parts.  Implementing a solution that focuses most of the burden of accurate information on automated machine capture allows the operator to focus on making quality parts and only input data that cannot be automatically generated.  To learn more about machine monitoring, please click here – http://www.memexoee.com/solution/machine-monitoring/

But what about turning data into information that can be utilized to make decisions?

One of our customers initially thought that capturing automated machine data would create massive amounts of data that would sit in a computer and no one would use it.  That is where MERLIN comes in to play.  MERLIN takes all of that accurate and timely data and delivers it to various stakeholders in an easy-to-use form that can then be used to make decisions to improve the process.  This transparency of information creates a team environment for improvement that can energize the operation.  To learn more, please click here – http://www.memexoee.com/solution/oee-overall-equipment-effectiveness/