Richard you asked a good question, quoting the November conference call:
<<<A: John Jenkins - ......we keep coming back to is that the forcing function of Y2K is that the business system people will be awakened to the value of the information that exists at the shop floor level, the control there, and there'll be a lot of work done, we believe, to pull that information up into the business systems, which is a theme we've been pounding for years and hasn't previously been well received. So the whole Y2K experience is going to open that up dramatically as well."
Does anybody understand this? What information from the shop floor?
Give a couple of examples.
How would that be helpful? Give a couple of examples there.>>>
Richard, I'll give you my take but it is a question that I would like for you to hear Jenkins himself answer at the CC.
My take is that it has to do with the flow of communication between the front and back office. This is almost a cultural thing, ie the front office lives in Grosse Point and the factory floor lives in Detroit. That communication of information could go more smoothly if you take out the human element.
As you know, supply line management and just-in-time manufacturing are here to stay because excess inventory of raw material or product is a waste of working capital. To perfect the system, demand information has to flow smoothly all the way from the point of final sale to the receiving of raw material. Kind of like, if you want the Mississippi to rise in Memphis on Tuesday, you have to open the dams in Minnesota a week ago. Any hindrance in that flow of information or product wastes money, and the bigger the production, the more important minor hitches are.
For example your sales staff decides to accept a big rush order just as your line that makes the product for that order is scheduled for maintenance. Trouble.
Or you are producing a dated, perishable product and your overseas shipper can only ship half your capacity for a week. By the time the word gets back to your plant, you've got too much product made and no shipper.
I would go to the web site of TAVA and look at their "case histories" about some Systems Integration problems and solutions. Everybody on SI talks about the "core business", few understand it.
tavatech.com
One example:
Chesebrough-Pond's USA
Award Winning SP88 Batch Control System
------------------------------------------------------------------
Challenge
Chesebrough Pond's USA manufactures a variety of consumer products including toothpastes, lotions, creams, hair sprays, deodorants and antiperspirants. "Where we once had one brand of hand lotion, we now have to manufacture a number of different kinds to meet the varying needs of our customers," J. Keith Unger ,manager of automation engineering, points out. Compounding the situation is the intensifying competition from around the world, unpredictable economic conditions and the increasing regulation of products and work floor practices. To be successful, Chesebrough realized they must both improve flexibility and institute more aggressive control of their entire supply chains. Manufacturing needed to be positioned as a strategic opportunity.
The construction of a 51,000-sq. ft. expansion in Jefferson City, Missouri offered the opportunity to employ emerging new technologies. All production of Mentadent, Close-Up, Aim and Pepsodent toothpastes are consolidated at this plant. Their challenge was to be able to move products to market faster and be prepared for more frequent changeovers and smaller batches on the production floor.
In addition, they had to beat competition - Mentadent's early success was threatened soon after its debut when tartar control versions of arch-rivals Colgate and Crest began to appear.
Solution
To the rescue: advanced manufacturing technology and a state-of-the-art plant. TAVA Technologies/ACS designed the Jefferson City plant with a new manufacturing system that has an entire batch life cycle that is planned, executed and recorded in one integrated system. John Schaefer, manager of manufacturing systems design at TAVA/ACS, explains that the design effort began with the generation of General Design PracticesT that would govern development of all user interfaces and the control logic. "This would allow the interfaces supplied by multiple vendors and applications to conform to one 'look and feel,' and would simplify system maintenance for plant personnel."
Of importance to Unger was the reduction of time it took to begin production of a new recipe . . . from months to hours. So the facility was designed using the Instrument Society of America's new SP-88 guidelines for the design of batch processing controls. "The reason I am such a believer in the new SP-88 guidelines," Unger says, "is because of the flexibility they give us to create and reuse recipe procedural libraries."
The sophisticated control system was designed to integrate and aggressively manage all steps in the operation, including production scheduling, inventory supply and control, process control and automation, quality control and engineering maintenance. To operate this sophisticated new facility, TAVA/ACS created one of the first fully-integrated SCADA/MES applications. The system integrates supervisory control and data acquisition with high-level batch management, all supported by an open-architecture, relational database management system running on a Hewlett Packard server.
Outcome
The facility received the Automated Plant of the Year award from Control Magazine, a leading industry publication.
More important, Chesebrough protected its early Mentadent advantage from competitor attack by racking up a 2.6% increase in oral-care market share from 1993 to 1994.
The construction schedule was beaten by three months, which Chesebrough attributes to TAVA/ACS' formalized design methodology.
The new control system gives Chesebrough the capability of testing new product formulas right on the production line. This has reduced the time it takes to begin production of a new recipe . . . from months to hours.
The new facility is seeing benefits in inventory tracking, on-line recipe optimization, increased throughput and quality control.
------------------------------------------------------------------
System Components
(1) PLC 5/80
(3) Allen-Bradley PLC 5/60 Processors
(1) Allen-Bradley PLC 5/40 Processors
(10) FIX/DMACS View Nodes (Windows)
(3) FIX/DMACS SCADA Nodes (Windows)
(3) FIX/BOS SCADA Nodes (OS/2)
(16) HP Vectra 486/66 Workstations
(1) HP 9000 Sybase Database Server
(26) Hardy Instrument Scales on Data Highway 485
Bar Code Tracking
Ethernet TCP/IP Communication
1400 I/O Points
Please note that those 1400 I/O points are either data gathering or control output points. This is a large amount of information that was just not available before, the data gathering would be too cumbersome. (Also note, that for Y2K purposes, these points would be through "embedded chips", only a handful would have date functions i.e. mostly for maintenance, but in a system that had been cobbled together over the years from different vendors, no one would know just which chips might have a Y2K problem. Also note that this would not mean 1400 chips, some of these functions would be through PLC's and some chips would have multiple I/O functions)
Zebra |
