Cristian Marfá, cristian.marfa@wonderware.com colabora con redindustria escribiendo este interesante artículo en el que se tratan los retos a los que se enfrentan las empresas que llevan a cabo procesos de empaquetado.
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Introduction
A common theme found in production facilities today is the need to gain greater production from existing assets. As manufacturers in all packaging industries add new product lines or consolidate production facilities, system performance improvement is gaining ever increasing importance.
When reaching the packaging process step, the final product is complete and only the end consumer format is missing. Packaging is what the consumer sees and how brand is recognized. And because consumer needs vary a lot, packaging is a prime candidate for optimization. Metrics and standards, together with performance software solutions, are being used to measure and improve the performance of existing packaging lines to a level not seen in years past.
Apply metrics to gain greater production from existing assets
With the propagation of new packages, many manufacturers are pressed to add additional capabilities to their production lines. Typically, as capabilities are added, the efficiency of a line decreases. Production efficiencies are seriously impacted by the inability of diverse systems in packaging lines to constantly operate in a balanced state. Even if each piece of equipment is carefully matched to line demands, the differences in acceleration/deceleration, start-up needs, loading, and micro stops create the need for more sophisticated controls and buffering of product flow between production cells.
This complex scenario is more difficult to manage when the market and economical situation is pushing the line of business management to gain upon the objectives for a reduce product loss, delivery time, downtime, start-up time, changeover time, etc. Achieving those common objectives gets complicated when there is a lack of transparency and common metrics in packaging lines, and due to that, business objectives can be affected.
Having the right metrics provides the organization with the basis for progressive improvements in order to gain greater production from existing assets.
What companies shall do to enforce performance management
Standards
For years, packagers have bemoaned the lack of a standard benchmark to compare packaging line performance. OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) promises to change all this by offering a single number that could theoretically allow an apples-to-apples comparison between different packaging lines at the same or different companies.
There are dozens of formulas, systems and metrics being used to improve the whole manufacturing process, but only OEE correctly reduces complex production problems into simple, easy-to-follow steps in handling data and information. The OEE helps you to methodically improve your equipment efficiency by using basic measurements and is a very simple metric that immediately indicates the current status of a manufacturing process.
OEE is a basic measurement of how available your equipment is, how it performs, and what kind of quality it produces. OEE also becomes a multifaceted tool allowing you to understand the effect of the various issues in the manufacturing process and how they affect the entire process.
Shop floor space and packaging machine environment have also become a resource that must be carefully managed and conserved to successfully apply OEE measurements.
On a typical high speed packaging line, many line configuration types can be found. Equipments are connected through a common network or simply to internal sensors indicating if the accumulator is full or empty. Since equipment vendors have to guarantee certain performance levels (unit rate per unit of time) to companies, often times they are reluctant to change their control system program. Several surveys by Packaging World magazine have demonstrated that a typical manufacturing company will have packaging lines with the following characteristics.
- 50% of all packaging lines don’t have a common network between equipments
- 50% of all packaging lines have between 2-4 control system vendors
- 50% of all packaging lines have between 2-7 equipments or machines
- 50% of all packaging lines don’t have a common standard between them to exchange data
- Machine vendors don’t usually account for a supervisory system (only production data is typically used)
In order to achieve flexibility in this heterogeneous scenario, there are organizations like OMAC (Open Modular Architecture Controls); producing standard guidelines to minimize the engineering cost and reduce project schedules. These initiatives and guide lines can be shared with machine vendors in order to gain more flexibility and reduce dramatically the integration cost on performance initiatives.
By applying standards effectively, the manufacturing value chain will have the technology to make it a competitive advantage on quality, production, and inventory for companies, as well as provide the strategic level to differentiate it from competitors.
Technology
Many companies use paper-based methods or nothing at all to track equipment downtime, efficiency, or to assess the main reasons for production losses. However to sustain top performance, a key point is to be able to develop and implement the best operating practices more quickly; including the equipment monitoring strategies, and the connectivity to make real time data available to all workers in the organization. To get the benefits of a performance management initiative, companies should provide their organizations with the right information and tools. These software tools should:
- allow them to compare similar equipment or even production lines
- provide the right real time data derived in the same way (apples to apples comparisons)
- examine their best performing equipment and production lines details
- assist in the formulation of best operating practices
- base decisions on hard data and avoid personal opinions or “guesstimates”
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