Shop floor, warehouse inventory monitoring
Our electronics manufacturing centre has over 100 tools and spares inventory scattered over 20,000 sq meters of production area. We are at times clueless on where the essential tools are. If only we had technology that would help us easily locate these inventory items. I am sure our supervisors and shop floor managers will find a noticeable improvement in productivity, which means we will be able to ship out our products at a much higher rate and save costs, which can be passed on to our customers in these testing times. Preventive maintenance, repairs, remote monitoring etc can help us save and improve efficiencies.
Repair and maintenance monitoring
Our repair and preventive maintenance systems are completely on manual methods, hence there is a lot of paper work for the technicians to log while visiting different zones in the production area, to conduct troubleshooting, repairs and preventive maintenance. We ideally need a solution that points out how much of repair and preventive maintenance time our technicians spend in each zone so that we can devise an activity based system.
Inventory tracking solutions
The yearly inventory and spares stock take is a week long exercise, which involves matching production trolleys, bins and racks for procurement, production and finished goods. I wish we had an efficient inventory tracking solution that helped reduce the stock take time so that our production is not stalled during this annual activity, which helps in improved throughput and lower cost in production management. Some of our factories located globally also face the problem of equipment and inventory theft. Deploying antitheft solutions that give our alerts when something moves out of the factory or warehouse can help us save a lot of money.
Production monitoring systems
We are in the business of manufacturing high end equipment for the semi conductor industry and our production shop floor spans an area of 30,000 sq.meters. It is difficult for us to the exact time it takes for an equipment to move from one zone to the other. Ideally, a production zone performance system would be good to have so that we can draw matrices and devise performance rewards.
Factory equipment monitoring solution
Ten years ago, we deployed over 300 analog temperature sensors on various equipment with localised dashboards. The group of 10 supervisors need to spend time at each of these dashboards to understand variations in temperature, pressure and humidity levels. We badly need a centralised digital dashboard that will provide instant alerts and notifications when critical parameters turn abnormal.
Detecting of anomalies in industrial equipment
There are 3 eCarts and 4 industrial elevators in our production area built over 4 floors. They work on a 27 x 4 basis as our factory is only shut twice a year – once for annual inventory stock take and the other for preventive maintenance , fumigation and disinfecting. Whenever one of the elevators of eCarts breakdown, we lose critical time, which stalls the flow of raw material and people between the floors. We need a IOT in production line for remote condition monitoring solution that will help detect anomalies in compressors, pumps, pulleys, gears etc.
Knowledge tracking solution
Being a world class product engineering company, we attract some of the best talent globally. Our corporate social responsibility ensures we hire some of the brightest engineers from the nearby universities of repute. Onboarding these trainee folks is a 3 month process and each team is assigned to a senior production supervisor. I wish we had a knowledge tracking system to ensure the trainee engineers shadow the senior on a continual basis.
Safety for factory contractors
We have a group of 120 specialised contractors who visit our factory on a regular basis. They work in compliance, inspection, electrical and certification departments. As part of workplace safety norms, it is critical that we ensure their wellness and production management safety of our long term contractors, by monitoring their movement, define danger zones, prohibited areas and track physical activities to avoid incidents such as electric shocks and fall from heights. We need to deploy a smart industry solution.
Cost of production management solutions
Our bosses travel the world to study advances in the production shop floor and workflow management systems and every time come back with enterprise solutions that are so hard to implement, requires rewiring and certifications, takes time to train our folks on the shop floor area and costs a bomb. These high budget spendings are frozen for the time being. Two years ago, we deployed a solution from a local vendor and we ended up spending a lot of time in changing batteries of the devices and the accuracy levels were in the tune of 25 meters, which made no sense for inventory and workforce monitoring.
Call us, speak to our experts to know more about our ready to deploy, fully integrated, shop floor production management, workflow monitoring and inventory tracking solutions based on Wirepas technology, an award winning, massively scalable architecture.