Ferry Manufacturing Snippets: April 22nd - 28th 2024

Here's the weekly digest of Ferry's manufacturing snippets!

Monday - 22nd April

Do you know how much insight you can derive from tracking a product counter in manufacturing? Seems like a "dumb" metric on the surface.

Let's take an example of a production line which packages bags of candy. The machine (or the attached PLC) tracks the product counter.

What's a product counter in this example? Every time a bag of candy is produced, the counter increases by 1. And the machine can be reset so that the counter goes back to zero.

Now let's mix it with some software smarts. A product counter gives you the real-time rate of production on the line. That tells you how long the machine is active or down for. You can even infer some types of downtime from this number alone. You can get OEE with some quality reporting.

You get batches. Overlay SKU information and you understand how production performs across all your products.

Overlay scheduling and now you can tell in advance exactly how long something takes to produce and predict issues before they happen.

You get a lot of MES-like capability without the headache.

From one machine. From one number.

Tuesday - 23rd April

Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are a bedrock of software in industry, but are not designed to give frontline teams (& the rest of the business) the tools they need to run production at its best.

Manufacturing intelligence (MI) is the missing gap that fills the void. Here's our deep dive take (link in the comments below)

https://www.deployferry.io/blog/your-manufacturing-execution-system-needs-a-sibling

Wednesday - 24th April

A common myth in manufacturing: you need to fully automate a line before you can collect valuable data on its performance.

The reality: a simple sensor (i.e. photo eye) is more than sufficient to get you the count of product, and therefore throughput.

From that, there is a wealth of info that you can glean for performance management.

Many lines are manual or semi-automated, especially in sectors like food & beverage.

You don't need to invest in heavy capex to get visibility into your ops.

The right (often cheap) piece of hardware + good software will do.

Thursday - 25th April

Bagging is one of the hardest parts of a manufacturing process to get right.

It's due to "SKU multiplication": you may have one type of product (i.e. dog food), but this needs to be packaged into differing sizes & weights of bags (i.e. many different SKUs).

This is often split across multiple lines that bag according to requirements simultaneously (or close thereabouts).

The problem is: when you have a breakdown in a line, this backs up your process. You have unpackaged product that you need to clear before you can produce a different one (i.e. cat food). And meanwhile your other bagging lines are sitting dormant because they have no product to bag!

The solution requires a really clear understanding of scheduling, SKU production performance, and downtime prediction to get right.