Put Your Manufacturing Process on a Diet and Improve Your Bottom Line

To boost profitability, companies look for ways to make their operations leaner. That means reducing waste, reducing costs and improving efficiency. ILS Technology is showing them how intelligent connections can help them make smarter decisions about their operations and get them closer to their goals.

Industry initiatives such as Six Sigma or service-oriented architectures (SOA) are designed to increase the availability of live production data. An important step in streamlining operations involves the seamless transfer of this data to the enterprise applications that management uses to examine manufacturing output and determine how to make improvements.

For one automobile manufacturer, this meant compiling data from machines on the assembly line as parts were made. The manufacturer needed that information delivered to an SOA application where the data could be compiled in order to satisfy government regulations covering the traceability of components. Failure to meet regulations could have forced the company to delay shipments.

The car maker’s existing system relied on custom connectors and multi-tier device drivers to deliver this information. But this system’s ability to provide timely data was limited and costly to maintain. ILS Technology’s deviseWISE 2.0 platform significantly improved the data gathering and processing. Working in conjunction with an automation supplier and an IT vendor, ILS Technology embedded deviceWISE into programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in the factory that compiled data on parts as they were built. Direct connections from the PLCs were quickly established with the manufacturing execution system, which sent live data to the company’s SOA application.

In a process that took only a few hours to integrate, the car maker was able to meet regulatory requirements and avoid shipping delays. The connectivity provided by deviceWISE also enabled the company to eliminate several layers of traditional infrastructure, improve response and reduce implementation time and cost. As a result, the car maker increased production efficiency and became a smarter, more efficient manufacturer.

Working smarter is another way to make operations leaner. While many companies employ robots in their factories to improve the assembly process, they may not know whether these machines are being used to their full potential. Analytics are designed to answer questions like this. These applications monitor how each robot is being used by examining motion, interaction, production counts, transactions, cycle times, electricity usage and other factors. Analytics can help companies determine how to make their robots operate closer to peak performance, which enables them to manage their assets more effectively and boost productivity.

Problems arise in getting the data from the robots to analytics applications in the enterprise IT domain, because technology platforms used in production are different from those used in enterprise IT and the link between them is weak. ILS Technology platforms enable direct connections from the controllers that collect data from a wide variety of devices and link them directly to the applications where the data can be analyzed. This allows companies to employ analytics sooner so they can instruct their machines to receive orders faster and, ultimately, run at peak performance.

Reducing the cost of operations is also a way of becoming leaner. Real-time collaboration is helping equipment manufacturers cut their costs. They are delivering more effective service and support to customers around the world by linking to tools with network connections, diagnosing technical problems with real-time exchanges and making repairs without leaving the office.

However, there is a key challenge to deploying these real-time collaborations. Many OEM customers have developed security measures to protect their intellectual property (IP) and to prevent their information technology from outside attacks and viruses. These security measures greatly limit the amount of information that OEMs can access through a network connection.

With its secureWISE platform, ILS Technology enables OEMs to establish secure, network connections to any of their customers’ remote operations. This is possible because of secureWISE’s connect-once, access-many architecture, which eliminates the need for site-to-site VPN connections between multiple locations. Security is increased and IT infrastructure operating expenses and overhead decrease.

By addressing the security issue, network connections to a customer’s remote operations are used to establish collaborative sessions between on-site technicians and a supplier’s technical experts. The results for customers: dramatically reduced production costs by optimizing equipment performance through faster response time, faster ramp time for new systems, reduced mean-time-to-repair and reduced downtime.

Using secureWISE, technical experts who used to fly halfway around the world to address customer-repair issues can avoid unproductive travel time. In addition, reliance on field service personnel is reduced through these real-time connections. Now companies are able to consult on multiple repairs in one day from their home offices. This enables OEMs to improve the distribution of their service expertise to customers all over the world, while reducing the cost of providing these services.

ILS Technology is helping companies in many industries discover more ways to make their operations leaner, reduce cost and improve efficiency. By linking data from operations with enterprise applications, ILS Technology is allowing companies to make their operations more efficient. By allowing OEMs to fix their customer’s equipment through network connections, ILS Technology enables them to reduce the cost of services. These connections help companies become leaner and more cost effective—and get closer to their profitability goals.