Executive Overview
Many high-end smart manufacturing strategies and solutions for large corporations with highly educated experts and support centers exist. Small and medium sized enterprises (SME), however, represent the bulk of the gross national product (GNP) of most or all nations. SMEs have difficulty accessing these strategies and solutions because they lack competencies and capacity to invest.
ARC谘詢集團across the approach that thyssenkrupp Materials IoT, a subsidiary of thyssenkrupp, uses to overcome these hurdles.thyssenkrupp Materials IoT (tkMIoT)helps companies connect their legacy equipment, particularly poorly or non-instrumented equipment that is neither automated nor networked. Once equipment is connected, tkMIoT creates and implements affordable solutions. Before diving into the two case studies presented here, we provide some basics on how to judge and assess benefits from smart solutions, as well as a brief overview of categories of solutions to consider.
Assessing and Understanding Benefits of Smart Solutions
Making changes in organizations can create benefits if change is well-managed. It is important to consider net benefits, that is, after subtracting costs from benefits. A project costs money before it starts creating benefits. The cashflow is therefore negative in the beginning. Then benefits kick in reversing the negative cash flow trend. Net benefits start to accumulate after pay-back time has been reached.
Often, the starting point for a change is technological, but other types of changes, for example, changes to business processes, or levels of training of competencies can also create benefits. The combination of those factors is complex to assess but using a good methodology it is possible.
To assess net benefits, it is useful to start with identifying the most important contributors. A value driver tree, detailing the cost and value contributions related to a change is a systematic way to assess net benefits. There are two main categories that are impacted: operational (EBIT) and capital cost. Operational benefits in the category of increased turnover can be related to increased production amounts, increased average sales price, and in the case of services, increased productivity (the same output with less people) or increased output (more output with the same people).
At increasing or constant turnover, another main lever is to reduce cost. This can be maintenance cost, operational cost, material and utility cost, and manpower cost. The cost of capital can be influenced by delaying or avoiding investments, for example by debottlenecking a production line and producing more than was originally thought possible, or to reduce working capital, that is, being more efficient with raw materials and intermediate products, and/or creating less scrap or rework. The examples of smart manufacturing or connected manufacturing that we discuss below all create benefits in one of these categories.
There are other ways to categorize solutions in manufacturing: the ISA-95 standard distinguishes activities and processes in four main domains: production, quality, maintenance, or “inventory.” The latter also includes logistics, warehousing, distribution, etc. Often, smart manufacturing solutions are described by those domains, for example:
Overall equipment efficiency or OEE:OEE is often focused on understanding unwanted production stops, and improving total production time, thereby amounts produced, related directly to turnover. Of course, there may be stops or slowdowns related to maintenance, to quality issues, or to materials (inventory), and therefore OEE can be a useful tool to improve different aspects in an integrated manner.
Predictive maintenance:This type of solution makes maintenance more efficient and effective. It has impact on maintenance cost, and often also on increasing production value, because there are less unwanted production stops. Smart solutions often monitor the equipment to determine the best moment for maintenance: not too early, which would reduce quantities produced, but certainly not too late, often causing additional cost because of damage to the equipment.
On-line or in-line quality measurements leading to real-time grading．通過使用連接儀器或推導定性ty KPIs from instruments that provide real-time quality values, two major benefits arise: the production can be graded according to the levels of quality achieved, labeled, and priced accordingly, possibly leading to an increase of average sales price and to increased client satisfaction. Secondly, the visibility on the quality produced in real-time provides the opportunity to spot quality issues in production early, reduce waste and downgraded material/products in favor of top-grade material/products.
Optimizing plant logisticscan be a complex matter, with factors including materials reception, quality control of incoming goods, intermediate storage, picking, storage and intralogistics of incoming goods, intermediate and end products, packaging, shipping, and more. Minimizing the storage of materials reduces working capital, and the capacity to get products quickly to clients impacts operational income and thereby available cash.
thyssenkrupp Materials IoT Smart Manufacturing Approach
thyssenkrupp, of which tkMIoT is a subsidiary, is a major producer of basic materials such as metal sheets and rolls of slitted metal. The company is in the category of “commodity materials,” sold at modest prices and produced in high volumes. This type of activity has little capacity to invest in smart solutions and must rely upon simple, affordable, and effective solutions. The different production lines are all very similar to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) with few personnel, and no support from specialized central services. This type of solution is accessible to many other companies other than thyssenkrupp, with modest capacity to invest.
In 2019 the company thyssenkrupp materials created a spin-off “thyssenkrupp materials IoT GmbH” to develop an Industrial IoT platform for internal and external use, with the focus on connectivity of old equipment, which is often poorly instrumented and automated, and often not or poorly connected. To connect modern equipment is much easier in comparison. They created toii a technical ecosystem connecting machines and things to exchange data for higher shopfloor efficiency. The rationale to produce a product line competing with that of large players, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services or Siemens MindSphere was that many IoT platforms exist, but they provide little help on the “first data mile,” especially if that mile includes old equipment. Core functions required by SMEs were also not readily available at an affordable price-point, according to tkMIoT.
Toii achieved many benefits within thyssenkrupp within its first few years of existence:
- 52 percent downtime reduction in a steel service center.
- 10 percent machine throughput increase on a packaging line.
- Over 50 types and over 500 machines connected, with the oldest dating back to 1961.
- 30 sites digitalized.
Case Study: Metal Sawing
This use case focuses on Overall Equipment Efficiency (or OEE). Its implementation is extremely simple and low cost. The objective was to increase machine productivity and availability and reduce the cost for sawing blade replacement.
Each piece of production equipment was connected to a little box with three buttons and a status indicator with four lights -- green, blue, orange, and red -- calledtoii.Lights．這個盒子連接到一個電信號the equipment indicating if the equipment is running or at standstill. If the equipment runs, the light is green. If the equipment is stopped, the operator can choose from three buttons, with configurable causes for the stop, for example: defect (red); setup or transition (orange); or lacks material (blue). The box is connected via Wi-Fi or another protocol and via the plant network to a dashboard providing an overview of the status of the equipment in the plant.
The supervisors can see with a single glance if equipment is running, if not why, and for how long it stands still. They can focus their actions on the most important problems. This saves a lot of time walking through buildings to get equipment status.
The tool provides statistics on average performance per shift, as well as an analysis of the used capacity of the different machines. In the example below, one machine is fully loaded while another runs at very low capacity, providing clues on how to debottleneck the plant and increase production.
The tool also provides analysis of the most important causes for production stops (not shown), as well as cycle times (not shown). If cycle times get longer this is an indication that machine tools need to be changed or maintained. The same analysis also clearly shows setup time between series. It is possible to benchmark and compare machines or production sites and learn from those who perform better.
The key lever for benefits is the transparency on effective production and causes of production stops. An important success factor is the adoption and the support of personnel. If the tools are collectively interpreted as an opportunity to improve and make the plant prosper and possibly grow, this can work out very well. The focus should be on learning from mistakes and improving what is possible.
Table of Contents
- Executive Overview
- Assessing and Understanding Benefits of Smart Solutions
- thyssenkrupp Materials IoT Smart Manufacturing Approach
- Case Study: Metal Sawing
- Case Study: Slitting and Packaging
- Recommendations
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