BY BOB GATES
Discrete manufacturers face increasing costs, global competition and growing consumer demands. They must move faster, better and leaner every day just to keep up with, let alone stay ahead of, competitors. They face pressure to produce more for less and to quickly respond to changing market demands while lowering costs. In short, they have to capture every operational efficiency possible. Hence, lean manufacturing is more critical than ever and manufacturers need to take this to the next level, particularly in the face of the opportunities presented by the industrial internet where machines and devices are connected and people have access to operational insight wherever they are working, with business intelligence at their fingertips.
One way to take lean manufacturing to the next level is to complement it with the principles of Six Sigma, which also seeks to eliminate waste by streamlining and improving all business processes and removing variations within the process. The combination of the two is dubbed Lean Six Sigma. Manufacturers can get more out of Lean Six Sigma techniques because of the explosion of data from todays connected machines that has been enabled by the Industrial Internet. Applying advanced Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solutions, this data can provide insight to improve the top and bottom lines of a business—better customer service, shorter lead times, higher production performance and operations efficiency—all while avoiding costly mistakes. Digitization of manufacturing processes and data with MES uncovers interrelationships and deep insights across the enterprise and provides the underpinning from which big data analytics can inform strategic planning, guide real-time operations and uncover root causes of issues before they become problems.
Building the Foundation
From a Lean Six Sigma perspective, MES software technologies are best leveraged once the proper foundation is in place that answers the following questions:
- Am I collecting the right data?
- Do I have an effective and efficient way to store and access it?
- Do I have a way to visualize it in context?
- Do I have a way to get it to the right people?
- How can I integrate analytics into my production plan?
Collecting the right meaningful data you need from your manufacturing process, critical assets and people is imperative. Determine the key sources of that data—whether its product data, execution data, work instructions, quality metrics, supply chain metrics or genealogy/traceability data. And remember that in the age of the Industrial Internet, the data is not only inside building walls, but also from sources and activities that feed the facility, like suppliers and customers who are served after products leave the factory.
The next step is to measure your manufacturing processes with capabilities that enable you to collect, store and manage your data at the enterprise level, which may require the consolidation of multiple plant historians into a single historian, with common configuration. Finally, you need the ability to handle a number of different types of data—time series, metadata, pictures, videos, etc.—and correlate them together within a common context. The right MES solution enables you to collect, store and manage your industrial big data to leverage higher-level analytics. This is where Lean Six Sigma delivers valuable business insight, and powerful performance improvements start to take shape.
