Manual control of multi-level production processes is still ubiquitous despite advancing digitalization. Digital solutions and the expertise to implement them are available. Seamless tracking of products and orders through an entire production line has become easily available. In this context, the OEM-developed NEA|XPLORE platform has already proven its benefits in applications in the powder coating industry and provides quantifiable added value. There are exciting perspectives for other applications as well.
Gut Feel, Pen and Paper
Although terms like “digitalization”, “industrial IoT”, “production automation” and “machine-to-machine communication” are all around, a lot of manufacturing companies still often lack connected shop floors and integrated monitoring and control solutions. Pen-and-paper-battles are still fought where digitalization could provide quick wins.
It is not only that production orders are running through unintegrated machines in isolated production lines, but also efficient capacity utilization remains vague as there is no structured data collection. Inadequate data collection also has an impact on product quality that comes from equipment that is set up and run with gut feel. This usually leads to costly and time-consuming extra work to create insightful analyses and reports.
In the light of continuously increasing customer demands with regards to product quality, organizations are required to extend their activities regarding verification of production processes and proving optimal production conditions.
To comply with a strict set of rules regarding the product and its quality, a seamlessly traceable product at every step within the whole value creation chain needs to be achieved. This comprises the used resources and materials as well as the production parameters and machine settings for every production step. This information should be enriched by additional factors that have an influence on the quality of the final product.
Each production order or batch needs to be tracked closely during its way through the production, starting from filling raw materials into compounders and ending with labeling the final product’s packages. Therefore, every resource used within each production step needs to be uniquely identifiable. In addition to that, every machine or work stage needs to report which order and material is currently handled, delivering time-tagged information of starting points and end points. And finally, these machines or work stages need to provide information on their performance, parameter sets and sensor values for the produced goods.
Ideally, digital solutions should support all organizational levels in a manufacturing company from the Shopfloor, through the Operations Management up to the Corporate Level like visualized in the following overview:
In summary, the overall goal is to establish digital solutions as a key element for successful business operations enabling production process improvements, optimized decisions with short lead times, and increased availability of machines. This will lead to improved productivity and higher RoS.
A recommended solution depends on the present infrastructure and the acceptance of all involved parties confronted with the introduction of new processes, technologies, and change – referred to as the “digital maturity” of an organization.
Recording of production parameters is the traditional area of machine data acquisition devices. These devices connect to the different elements of a machine (e.g. PLCs, sensors) and persist the recorded values during production. The main challenges however are mostly the interfaces on the IT side as well as the accessibility of signals from existing machinery.
While state-of-the-art equipment can be tapped easily, heterogenous, and sometimes technologically inaccessible machines usually require experts’ evaluation to consider what data is really required and what sources of information are available.
To track which material is handled at which stage of the production process, the information of a resource used needs to be linked to a product or a production order (e.g. hand-over of a dedicated raw material container to a compounder). In modern contexts this is usually realized using scanning devices to register and de-register a production order at a certain machine.
Once the equipment is connected, traceability functionalities are established, then production process and order information can be analyzed and relevant KPIs can be calculated to deliver insights into manufacturing performance.
NEUMAN & ESSER is specifically addressing that with its standardized NEA|XPLORE platform solution: while providing accompanying hardware and software competencies as well as machine expertise NEA|XPLORE supports a smooth transition to digital manufacturing.
NEUMAN & ESSER has established its cloud based NEA|XPLORE platform as an intuitive digital solution to enable an optimized production of powder coatings.
Starting from raw materials that are processed through mixers, extruders and mills and finally packaged in cartons or bags NEA|XPLOREpowdercoatings connects machine data from fully integrated production lines with production order information and works as a single source of truth generating insights for each batch produced.
The installation of the specific data acquisition hardware is almost plug and play: The devices are mounted close to the PLC of the respective machine. Once connected to the PLC and plugged to power the NEA|XPLORE devices start sending current machine parameters into the cloud where data visualization tools are hosted, and analytical capabilities are used.
The installation may also cover scanning devices that help to tag production orders to machine data. Immediately after setup production orders can be monitored in real-time and analyses can start.
Insights from NEA|XPLORE refer to key metrics in manufacturing management:
Deeper dives into production parameters allow for detecting potential levers to increase efficiency. To make this more transparent, the following real-life example shows the comparison of two production orders of the same product on the same machine with identical batch size but different machine parameter settings.
The analysis of the data unveils a machine underutilization for one of the two batches (20% performance gap, 60 minutes of lost production). This results in a delta of production volume of 100kg/hour. For the respective production order this translates into a loss of revenue of 2,500 EUR, based on an assumed price to market of 5 EUR/kg of this product.
Analyses may also be conducted for the evaluation of product quality. It needs to be made sure that products are always manufactured under the same conditions using identical machine settings. Suspicious parameter developments serve as an indicator for potential quality deviations. And if detected early enough – ideally by monitoring the production in real-time – operators intervene immediately and prevent costly production of potential waste.
The examples above show that digital solutions in production processes create quantifiable impact of major importance to organizations. And the benefits from changing from cumbersome manual work to more automation are apparent.
But NEA|XPLORE is not limited to the standard setup. In most of its applications NEUMAN & ESSER has extended functionalities by additional modules to customize the platform to customer needs. Such modules range from in-depth downtime reporting apps to remote controlling machine parameter setting and adjustment.
Extending it even further puts XPLORE into the position of serving as a full Manufacturing Execution System (MES) when integrated into the broader landscape of Enterprise Resource Planning systems.
The NEA|XPLORE platform solution has proven its capabilities specifically in powder coating manufacturing processes. But obviously the solution has more field of applications.
NEA|XPLOREcompressors, for example, is used in supporting Service teams with real-time insights and reports of complex compressor system data to optimize machine performance and service processes.
Specifically, the dynamic developments in the battery industry are getting into the focus of NEUMAN & ESSR: Increasing requirements in processing graphite for demanding applications in high performance batteries will create a significant importance for digital monitoring according to production processes.