Industrial Automation - It Doesn't Have To... Be Myopic

Industrial Automation – It Doesn’t Have To…

Myopic is being short-sighted -- unable to clearly see things that are far away.
elliTek's mission is one of empowerment. We want manufacturers find a way to better position themselves moving forward. Our hope is that this podcast provides helpful perspectives.
This episode is about the tendencies we can have as human beings to focus on one piece of the puzzle but miss the picture as a whole.
Brandon shares a customer experience where the customer's focus was on the "squeaky wheel". You'll be surprised to hear what happened.
You'll also hear the important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) used in manufacturing and why they're important. Key Performance Indicators are anything that has to do with the performance of your process and gives an indication of that.
Brandon gives helpful definitions and examples for some industry terms listed below.

• Process Data - A machine, cycle, process, or manufacturing process. Processes have faults and those are called downtime events.
• Production Downtime
• Production Volume
• QA - Quality Assurance. Where quality and production come together.
• Production Costs - The cost of raw materials and labor, plus electricity, cleanroom environment (if necessary), and the equipment being used.
• OEE - Overall Equipment Effectiveness. Process based indicators that assess the scheduled efficiency. OEE basically decides how many good parts can be made across a time.
• OOE - Overall Operations Effectiveness. Operational efficiency KPI that decides how many good parts could have been made.
• TEEP - Total Effective Equipment Performance. Uses OEE and OOE to track the overall effectiveness of whatever it is being measured. TEEP measures the performance across all time, 24/7. It's used to make decisions such as adding another production line, identifying if a line is being underutilized.
• OA - Overall Availability. This indicator is part of OEE, Overall Equipment Effectiveness.
• Product Data - Any data that has to do with the product being made. Traceability ties into product data. Used to improve your process
• Traceability - It's like a VIN on a car. It's used to retrace - see every process the product went through.
• Six Sigma - A quality program. A perfectly quality built and fully assembled ready to ship part.
• Defect Flow Out Prevention - Eliminating the opportunity for the defect to have ever occurred.
  • Zero Defects - Part of Defect Flow Out Prevention. Zero Defects is removing the possibility of building a perfectly bad part.
  • Process Skip Check - Ties in with traceability. The next machine process is alerted as to whether or not the part passed, failed, or didn't even go through the previous process. If the part failed or didn't go through the previous process, the next process is not given permission to stat.
    Process Skip Check is a method of Defect Flow Out Prevention. This leads to a cost savings, because a perfectly built bad part still uses resources and materials and ends up in the scrap bin. If the bad part is caught midstream, it can minimize the amount scrapped out.

elliTek's Workflow Manager which is part of the IIoTA™ Platform allows users to easily build their processes, connect them for certain part numbers, and do one to many - many to one relationships. The Workflow Manager gives users the ability to do Traceability.
Dashboard tools to create drag & drop web-based dashboards to view the KPIs listed above for a specific assembly line or lines are included in the IIoTA­™ platform.

Lastly, there's no need to fear databases! Listen to the full episode to find out