° Automotive supplier, USA
A plant that makes sintered metal parts for the automotive industry replaced paper shift reports and Excel with a production system that shows output, work in progress and scrap as it happens.
The starting point
Operators wrote their production on paper at the end of each shift, and a supervisor typed it into Excel. The stock between process stages was worked out by hand with pivot tables. Nobody saw the plant in real time, and decisions to outsource work came too late. The main contractor also needed the data in a fixed format for its own reporting.
What we changed
We built a production system for the plant. Operators record a shift in a phone app by scanning the QR code on the machine, with scrap and downtime reasons; supervisors can use a web form. The plant sees output as a table and as charts, work in progress between stages as a heatmap, the routing of every part as a flow diagram, OEE, a scrap Pareto and the demand burndown. Orders come in from the customer's SAP, and the export for the main contractor is generated. For live machine data we developed sensor hardware and a gateway, tested on a bench. The history from the old Excel files was imported.
The result
- ° Over 50 machines across more than 10 process stages in one system.
- ° Thousands of shift reports from the old Excel files imported, so the history did not start at zero.
- ° Work in progress between stages visible as a heatmap instead of pivot tables.
- ° A shift is recorded at the machine with a QR code scan.
Services
Before and after
Before
- Shift reports on paper
- Excel, typed up by the shift supervisor
- Stock between stages from pivot tables
After
Production system
- Shift entry with QR code
- Output, OEE, scrap
- Work in progress heatmap
- Part routing
Connected to
- Customer's SAP: orders
- Main contractor: reporting export
Next step
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