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Digital lean manufacturing in the industry 4.0 era
Digital lean manufacturing in the industry 4.0 era
George Gketsios
Senior Manager – Solution Consulting
Origins of Lean Manufacturing
Historical Overview
The lean manufacturing principles emerged in the industrial world shortly after WWII when Toyota decided to rebuild its operations from scratch by combining a set of pre-existing tools and practices from the Henry Ford era with a new mindset of zero tolerance towards the concept of waste throughout its operations. That was the birth of the Toyota Production System. Since then, several key performance indicators (KPI), with the most fundamental one being the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), concepts, and lean tools have been developed, utilized, and continuously updated all over the world in the direction of optimizing manufacturing operations, eliminating waste, and driving equipment effectiveness, productivity, and profitability levels. Several decades on, a wide range of lean manufacturing methodologies have been created and subsequently evolved to implement daily, weekly, monthly, and annual routines in the manufacturing industry.
Evolution Over the Years
More recently, these methodologies have been combined with new managerial tools and concepts that place industrial operators at the heart of the journey of operational excellence, aiming to instill a continuous improvement culture in manufacturing shop floors and beyond.
Results & Trend
Numerous companies and their plants have benefitted from the ever-growing knowledge in this field, and this has led to products of ever-growing quality with low life cycles and low cost being offered to customers worldwide. Arguably, this trend is expected to continue pushing factories to their capacity and productivity limits in the future throughout the whole range of the manufacturing industry.
Need for Reliable & Accurate Data
Common Ground
No matter which particular methodology is chosen for implementation, whether it is a customized solution based on Just In Time, TPM, IWS, etc., or a readily available lean manufacturing routine, they all share the same basic lean principles and, therefore, the same common basic prerequisites in order to bring the anticipated results.
Navigating Through Losses
One of the most important requirements in the operational excellence journey is access to complete, accurate, and reliable data regarding the current level of operation in every part of the shop floor at any given time. The opportunity to set the proper direction in driving decision-making, addressing the correct issues, focusing on the most impactful actions, and monitoring their effect on the process productivity depends heavily on the ability to retrieve, analyze, and archive raw data for every step of the process at any given moment.
Traditional Data Collection & Analysis
In traditional lean improvement projects, raw data was captured in a sporadic fashion using either SCADA systems incorporated in industrial machinery or the use of paper template documents that were completed manually by operators and supervisors. As a result, the data was neither complete nor detailed enough in most cases. The subsequent analysis involved a time-consuming process that was either manual or facilitated in a Microsoft Excel environment, along with several assumptions that had to be made to calculate the OEE and draw meaningful business insights from it. These lean manufacturing practices are shifting rapidly with industry 4.0.
Information Technology Breakthroughs
Over the last decade, breakthroughs in technology associated with what we nowadays call “Industry 4.0” have changed the scenery drastically. They have generated opportunities that were out of reach in the past to such an extent that companies now shift their focus from automating individual tasks to developing end-to-end digital transformation strategies.
IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) allowed the connection of different pieces of equipment under one electronic management system, which paved the way for remote controlling and gathering of operational data in an automatic way at all times.
Big Data
Big Data analytics has led to great opportunities in gathering, organizing, and analyzing large volumes of data towards identifying not only immediate business insights but also underlying trends and patterns that allow now more than ever for more preventive action.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing and cyber-physical systems are taking automatic processes and real-time physical intervention to a new level as computers can control deviations in the physical systems, apply proposed actions and immediately monitor their impacts on the system.
Artificial Intelligence
Additionally, artificial intelligence algorithms have been employed to go through a vast volume of accumulated data, action plans, and their impact on the process in order to “train” the system through machine learning to be able to propose immediate solutions and actions to real industry problems thereby enhancing and speeding up troubleshooting routines and evaluating different potential improvement scenarios.
Capturing the True Value of Digital Transformation Through Industry 4.0
Direction Setting
The fourth industrial revolution has allowed operators and managers, who now have the tools required to automate a large part of their day-to-day duties, to provide valuable and insightful feedback in real-time and quickly identify the real pain points of their processes and equipment. Digital technologies shift their focus in the right direction of tackling the most crucial issues in the manufacturing process and the equipment with the most value-driven approach for the overall business, thereby triggering a digital lean transformation.
Decision-making
Decision-making is now faster and more accurate than ever-changing management practices throughout the organization as different developments can be applied, tested, and adopted with the minimum level of waste in the process with the highest rate of success. This way, industrial operations on the shop floor can be optimally streamlined, and improvement can be achieved at an accelerated pace and with minimum effort. Lean initiatives were never easier to implement. World-class manufacturing companies have recognized the importance of digital transformation as a competitive advantage in the current era.
Vimachem OEE & Analytics
Vimachem’s OEE & Analytics solution offers a set of Industry 4.0 digital tools and KPIs specially developed to navigate today’s pharma production processes through current and future challenges in the ever-lasting journey towards digital lean and operational excellence.
READY TO AUGMENT YOUR SHOP FLOOR OPERATIONS?
READY TO AUGMENT YOUR SHOP FLOOR OPERATIONS?
Vimachem Manufacturing Analytics - OEE
The Manufacturing Analytics – OEE module is an intelligent Pharma OEE Cloud solution that allows you to collect, store and visualize data across your site / enterprise and apply AI algorithms to optimize production efficiency and product quality.