Smart and Agile Manufacturing, An Essential Ticket to Enter Supply Chain

Smart and Agile Manufacturing

The COVID-19 epidemic is unpredictable, and market demand changes more rapidly with the epidemic, which also makes it more difficult to grasp the overall economic direction of the world.

The world trend faced by the machining and components industry remains unchanged. Due to the aging of the global population and changes in the labor force structure, not only Southeast Asia and China, but also labor costs in various countries are increasing day by day. In the manufacturing industry, in order to reduce costs, stabilize production quality, and facilitate management, the demand for building automation equipment and robots in factories continues to be bullish.

A small number of diverse customer needs, short delivery times, urgent orders, coupled with the carbon reduction regulations and supply chain requirements related to green manufacturing and ESG by governments and customers in recent years, such as the United States is currently developing The Carbon Tariff Clean Competition Act (CCA), which will be implemented in 2024, will be implemented earlier than the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), and it is a challenge that the manufacturing industry will face in recent years.

Utilize the digital software platform tools of Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Machines/IoT technology to achieve the IIoT of the Industrial Internet of Things, integrate the automation inside the factory and various AIoT equipment and technologies such as robotic arms, AGV, and AOI impact recognition to create agile adaptable production and processing sites to respond to rapidly changing market demand, and realize smart factories and smart manufacturing to improve production efficiency and reduce factory electricity consumption and carbon emissions, in order to achieve green reduction in line with customer ESG conditions carbon manufacturing.

Smart and Agile Manufacturing Enhances Competitiveness and Does a Good Job in Energy Saving and Carbon Reduction

The products of mechanical processing and components are mainly metal products, and each product has a long manufacturing process and many processes, which may be casting, forging, milling, pressing, bending and grinding. Because there are many manufacturing procedures, the related personnel, machinery equipment and materials are used in a wide range, and it is easy to cause various wastes in the manufacturing process, and the production efficiency cannot be improved.

Insufficient production capacity, but idle equipment? What happened on the manufacturing site? In the product manufacturing cycle (MCT), the problems caused by various wastes between processes, in addition to being the main reason for the prolonged delivery time, such as equipment waiting for materials to stop idling, process mistakes that cause heavy work will also cause unnecessary cost waste and carbon emissions.

This may lead to many customers' ESG requirements for suppliers, because they do not meet the "carbon reduction" standard, which may affect the necessary conditions to become customers' preferred suppliers. How to reduce waste in the manufacturing process and achieve carbon reduction at the same time?

1. Improve Production Efficiency

Information transparency makes progress, bottlenecks and problems visible, prevents situations from happening, and improves utilization rate and OEE

There are more and more customized small-volume orders. If the factory is to be profitable, the equipment and production site must be able to work stably and smoothly.

Unforeseen situations often occur on the manufacturing site, resulting in downtime of equipment and machines. If the supervisor cannot find out the situation immediately, he will immediately troubleshoot the problem, resulting in long-term waiting and waste of machinery, equipment, personnel and materials, and even resulting in a decline in equipment OEE and production capacity.

And because the progress of production and the problems that occur are all filled in on paper by the on-site personnel before leaving get off work every day or every week, so the actual production progress will never be known on the day. If there is any poor quality or equipment condition, etc. The problem needs to be reported, and it may have been too long because the real reason has been forgotten.

There will be ultra-short delivery competition. Not only the business is not sure whether the customer's order can be shipped as scheduled, but the supervisor also does not know the current situation of the manufacturing site.

With the Internet of Things/IoT technology, the equipment can automatically report the real-time production status and progress data of the machine, or use smart tools such as tablet phones to assist the on-site personnel in an instant and convenient manner, and do a good job of reporting work and problem status fill in the declaration, and then integrate various real-time information through the system software platform to achieve transparency of manufacturing site information and make progress visible.

Through the real-time data management, whether it is the staff and supervisors at the manufacturing site, or the production management and business, they can know the latest order status and the actual progress of the manufacturing site. The business can communicate more proactively with customers about order delivery issues; production management can adjust more suitable production assignments at any time and adjust production scheduling plans; find out and fix it right away to keep production going.

Use the Internet of Machines/IoT technology to grasp scientific data, and use digital systems to construct models to assist supervisors to improve real problems and bottlenecks after the event, prevent recurrence of the situation, and continuously improve equipment utilization, OEE, and production efficiency.

Another important prerequisite for improving the overall production efficiency of the factory is to have healthy equipment, that is, the equipment must have a high and good rate of availability. Otherwise, if the daily inspection work is not done well, the equipment will be unstable, and there will often be failures without warning, requiring shutdown to wait for maintenance, which will disrupt the originally arranged production schedule and shipment progress.

In addition to affecting the delivery date of the order originally negotiated with the customer, it will also increase the chances of manufacturing on-site personnel and other follow-up processes and equipment downtime, resulting in waste during production. Therefore, the equipment should maintain stable production and improve processing efficiency. The factory has stable and high-quality equipment, so that the production capacity of the manufacturing site will be stable, thereby improving production efficiency.

2. Do A Good Job in Agile Management

The rapid changes in market demand have forced the machining and component industries to face the challenges of receiving orders and arranging production in small quantities. The production scheduling plan at the manufacturing site should be able to quickly and flexibly respond to market demand, so that the production capacity can be immediately allocated to the most efficient arrangement to solve this problem.

In order to achieve scientific production scheduling, accurate and timely delivery, the manufacturing site can be flexible at any time. The most basic thing is to have accurate standard working hours, so that the production scheduling plan of the production management can conform to the actual production status of the manufacturing site.

At the same time, it is necessary to grasp the real-time information and data of the production progress, and have the current utilization rate and load status of the equipment as the basis, so that the production scheduling plan can be flexibly changed in the shortest time and accurately. In the face of each important urgent order insertion or sudden adjustment of the order by the customer, the most effective and flexible arrangement can be made for the limited mechanical equipment and personnel and other important production capacity.

Ordering on the same day, shipping on the same day, and ultra-short delivery time are increasingly common customer requirements in the manufacturing industry, but why are the delivery dates and speed required by customers always unable to be met?

The products of mechanical processing and components are mainly metal products. The manufacturing process of each product is long and multi-process, which may be CNC, milling, casting, forging, press, pipe bending and grinding. And because the industry used to be used to mass production in the past, it often led to a waste of time waiting for the completion of the previous process in the post-process. In addition, the connection between different processes is not smooth, so the production cycle time is long, which affects machining and zero. One of the biggest factors in the lead time of the component industry.

With Increasing Uncertainties, The Trend of Smart Manufacturing + Green Manufacturing Is Inevitable

The impact of the epidemic has caused greater changes in the market. The orders that were originally optimistic last year have been revised down this year. Uncertainty factors have increased and changes have become more frequent. Therefore, the mechanical processing and component industries should build an agile factory for smart manufacturing. With the help of Industry 4.0's Internet of Things/Machine Internet of Things and digital system software tools, it can quickly and flexibly respond to changes in market demand.

The technology of smart manufacturing can assist enterprises to reduce all kinds of waste that should not occur during production and manufacturing, so that factories can control cash more effectively under the condition of rapidly changing demand. Moreover, there is still a large shortage of workers in the world. Enterprises can achieve digital transformation through Industry 4.0 technology. In addition to improving production efficiency, they can meet the requirements of reducing carbon emissions required by governments and customers, and achieve green manufacturing at the same time. What are you waiting for?