Inspection, no matter how rigorous, cannot alter the characteristics of a production process. It can root out sub-standard product, but unless you take action to improve the process itself, sub-standard product will continue to come off your lines.

However, you can measure process quality in a quantitative way and establish the process capability of your manufacturing operations. This is a measure of the extent of the variation of a key feature of a product ie. weight, length, thickness and so on, compared with the specification limits. It tells you how well you can expect a machine or a plant to perform.

One way or another, process variations cost your business. The obvious ways are things like unacceptable product quality and customer complaints, but frequent process interventions and unnecessarily high materials usage are equally damaging.

Superficially, production might be running smoothly, but handling process variation by playing safe can mean pouring millions of dollars down the drain – whether it’s overfilling liquids, applying too much coating or an inability to reduce thickness, for example. Do that and you’re effectively giving away materials you can’t charge for.

Systematically measuring the process variation and then managing it is the crucial step to making improvements. But this is difficult, because there can be many parameters that need to be measured.

The data can also take many forms, the analysis is complicated and to assemble the information in a consistent, coherent manner is not possible without one system bringing it all together. It’s not uncommon today to find people taking serious time out to produce customer certificates or monthly capability reports.

Shopfloor-Online MES has the functionality to collect all of this data in one place to automate the analysis and reporting and bring these process measures together for everyone to see in clear, easy-to-understand formats.

Once capable, stay capable
Shopfloor-Online’s SPC (statistical process control) application is also used to maintain process performance. If the process is stable then the process variation should remain constant and require only a watchful eye to ensure that it continues in a predictably acceptable way.

Nowadays lean manufacturing means that lines are running to ever-closer tolerances, operators have more lines to manage and more responsibility for the process but with less support. There’s less room for error and fewer people to detect problems.

Shopfloor-Online MES can pick up deviations in the production process before it results in reject products. Alarms are raised automatically and are highly visible and backed up with email, or SMS text services.

Equally valuable, where operators might have used their experience to intervene and adjust a machine unnecessarily, Shopfloor-Online MES gives visual confirmation that a process is stable and needs no intervention, ensuring that production keeps running.

Historically many companies have used paper-based charts when trialling the process-monitoring side of SPC but it’s only really practicable for a small number of parameters. Manual data collection and analysis on any bigger scale is a problem, especially where the data comes from different sources.

Shopfloor-Online MES can be linked directly to virtually any gauge or measuring system and holds all the information you need – materials, process and production data – and it’s instantly accessible through a standard web browser to anyone who needs it.

With Shopfloor-Online MES you are able to identify where your production process might be at risk and rectify problems before they become severe enough to cause machine breakdowns or customer complaints. The information it generates is a prerequisite of an achievable process improvement programme.