Industry 4.0 – Where are the use cases?
As you may already know, the first thing to do when building a new company or product is to understand the customer needs (use cases) and transform these needs into a viable product.
Today I was at a customer meeting. I do this on a regular basis since I have found the company mid of January to see, if the product fits their needs.
The customer is a 50 year old/young company with a unique positioning in sanitary goods. In some of their products they are even market leader in Europe. The company has two production locations. I went to their headquarters with some 60 people in production (one shift per day). The production processes are pretty simple like cutting, drilling, welding. The products are mostly packed by hand due to the high number of variants. The meeting was set up to find new Smart Manufacturing use cases.
My meeting with the production manager went quite well. I showed him what SINFOSY (our machine monitoring solution was renamed to SILVA) is about and he was thinking loudly where it might fit. Then we did, what I like most since my days as a shop floor consultant – we went to the production lines
What I saw there was chastening to me. No bottleneck machines – what usually is a point to discuss Predictive Maintenance, all machines are very robust, with almost no unplanned maintenance. No complex logistics to optimize, everything looked like an optimized production with no Smart Manufacturing needed. In case there is no business case it is even hard to apply a 100 €/month solution … However just before finishing the walk through the production area we ended at the packaging machines.
The company has a very sophisticated mounting system, which makes it possible to use one and the same fixation material for almost 80 % of their goods sold – fascinating! This was the only machine that runs with more than one shift per day. Guess what – just to supervise a machine, that does the packaging more or less automatically you need to have 10-25 % of one person for supervising the process – so far. A clear Smart Manufacturing use case – a small one, but nevertheless there was one.
What we will do now is, to use the SINFOSY (SILVA) machine monitoring solution to do the supervision of this process with a message being sent in case the machine stops packaging the fixation material – neat.
The company was well aware about this use case since years. In fact it is a Smart Manufacturing use case, but they could not justify any investment so far.
Multi shift – supervision needed. This is a new pattern I will apply from now on for my plant tours.
