Delivering operational excellence by assuring standardization through the implementation of industry 4.0 tools in a plant with two connected production lines. There were opportunities to enable formulation repeatability and to increase high-quality products, which contributed to waste reduction and an increase in productivity.
In a context of low demand and high number of customers’ claims due to quality issues, the plant needed to rapidly reduce the rate of poor-quality products in order to meet its customers’ expectations. Adding to that challenge, waste levels were high, lack of production formulation repeatability and low daily output were affecting the overall business performance.
Although there they used dashboards, improvements were necessary to ensure operational excellence discipline, which included management routines and improving consistent quality of final products
Poor production scheduling was generating unnecessary setups and excessive waste.
Performance reports and management meetings were not providing the necessary business insights to improve operational performance.
Operators were constantly changing production formulation without a clear & formalized criteria, generating high product quality variability.
Necessity to implement Industry 4.0 applications : KPIs, reports, data collection, real time data monitoring & automation.
The Standard Operational Procedure (SOP) to validate new raw materials and suppliers lacked clarity, recipes were outdated.
Due to the high cost of raw materials & hardship to acquire them, waste became a critical issue.
30% increase in throughput by implementing Industry 4.0 & Advanced Analytics Platform
QUALITY
Implemented a KPI daily review routine using quality KPI dashboards & root cause analysis (RCA) tools to improve decision making process.
Delivered a solution to enhance production formulation repeatability using short interval control routines, implementation of SOP & installation of a real time data dashboard that enable machine parameters monitoring
Reinforced buying policies to guarantee adequate raw materials and mitigate quality issues. The guidelines for production formulation were redefined & formalized
INDUSTRY 4.0 & DIGITALIZATION
Fully automated Operational and Executive Management Reporting & Dashboards directly connected to company’s ERP system – elimination of spreadsheets as structural tool – ‘No Excel left behind’.
Developed and implemented a streaming analytics platform allowing real-time monitoring of raw materials formulations, machine alerts and notifications. The solution also improved managers’ analytical intelligence through statistical fully automated analysis with insights for patterns and quality deviations.
PRODUCTION & OPERATIONAL PLANNING
Redesigned production operational planning process to optimize capacity, throughput and production setups.
Developed and implemented critical SOP such as setups execution and raw materials inspection leading to overall waste reduction.
Higher standards of quality contributed to the pursuit of operational excellence, including improvements in OEE and, historical records of monthly and daily throughput .