Shop floor efficiency monitoring
Improving shop floor efficiency, cost of production
Improving shop floor efficiency – Imagine a large manufacturing plant for semiconductor or marine equipment with an output of 300 high-value machines being produced on a weekly basis. The shop floor spans an area of 20,000 square feet, divided into multiple zones from the assembly, testing to quality assurance to paint shop, packing, and dispatch. The shop floor manager wanted an efficient indoor tracking system that would help implement a seamless performance management system that will spruce up production shop floor efficiency, reduce cost & improve workforce morale.
Indoor positioning, machine breakdown tracking & monitoring
Traditional factories use barcodes or passive radio frequency tags attached to the devices to track their movement from one location to the other. The handheld readers need to be kept close to the equipment in order to capture the product and part numbers. A cumbersome process indeed, which involves manpower.
I know that equipping the workforce with “tags” for tracking is a strict no-no in most cultures – privacy – freedom, etc. However, it is perfectly fine to deploy the sensors for a short while to assess the workflow patterns that would improve the priductivity on the shop floor – not to forget the environment monitoring solutions that can be integrated into the plant layout.
Factory Shop floor efficiency monitoring solutions
With our RipplesIPS, the workflow management aspects of a batch-processed factory shop floor become a breeze. The web-based software can be deployed on the cloud or on-premise, based on your needs. The on-premise model ensures that your valuable data stays “indoors”. Analytics aspects are using MQTT or Modbus interface which can be achieved using our add-on modules or pushing the data onto Kepware or facilities management functions.
Warehouse shop floor monitoring solutions
We offer ready-to-deploy Bluetooth mesh technology sensor solutions for monitoring temperature & humidity in the industrial environment. Regular updates from 1 to 10-minute intervals to remotely monitor the condition of perishable goods such as ice cream, fruits, medicines, wines, meat products, etc
Indoor location position, battery life, and cost of deployment
Well, these solutions are not really for “real-time” analysis, as there is this need to balance transmission levels and battery life – Remember – it is a completely wireless deployment and believe me – the last deployment at a proof of technology was done in under an hour – wow that is cool to bring new insights from a large factory shop floor.
At the workshop, someone wanted to know whether we could deploy machine downtime tracking. Well, it is certainly possible to add the industrial asset monitoring aspects to our indoor positioning tools, which also have temperature & humidity monitoring features.
Value proposition & cost of ownership
Earlier in a post, we mentioned the indoor positioning systems that deliver 2.5 meter accuracy, 5-year battery life, and reporting intervals of 10 minutes. The most affordable indoor tracking system in the world. The participants were awed at the accuracy we were able to demonstrate in the conference room which was up to 2 meters in certain cases !! Our RTLS solutions can also detect the temperature & humidity of moving objects in a mesh network environment.
One of the participants from the shipping industry wanted to know more about location tracking & monitoring used inside oil tankers, cargo ships, and offshore rigs.
Scalability and reliability of Indoor mesh network
A lot of time was spent clarifying the queries put forward by the few technology managers who participated in the production efficiency workshop. Interference, largest deployed network (700,000 IoT sensors !!), redundancy, etc. Read more on massively scalable RTLS software for indoor tracking technology
Shop floor efficiency monitoring workshop
At the recently concluded workshop on RTLS in manufacturing industry for improving shop floor efficiency. In the future, sessions are planned for shipping, healthcare, logistics, and other industries. We had a good turnout with decision-makers from leading industries such as shipping, pharmaceutical, government, healthcare, and aerospace attending the RTLS events in Singapore.
Call us to know more about smart factory solutions for improving shop floor efficiency, and indoor location tracking software solutions.