An American conglomerate with a significant presence in machinery and equipment production, energy generation, and the oil industry is counted among the world’s largest corporations. The company entered the Polish market during the 1990s and now operates eight production facilities, employing 7,300 staff members. Specifically, our client is a generator manufacturing plant.
What was the business need?
The challenge we aimed to address was the significant cost associated with machine downtime in the plant. The longer it took to request assistance during downtime, the more money the client lost. We identified that having reliable, real-time information about the status of tasks, often spanning several days (e.g., started, continued, completed), was crucial to improving production and increasing efficiency.
The biggest challenges that arise during the processes in the manufacturing plants are:
- downtime loses,
- communication problems between the teams and employees,
- excessive and unstructured data, often in paper form,
- lack of up-to-date information,
- lack of prediction of failures and other events,
- lack of control over OEE indicators and KPIs.
Our aim was to eliminate or reduce them all.
How did we do it?
We believe in the power of simplicity. Our system is intentionally designed to make success is achievable by minimizing losses and streamlining operations.
The project was conducted within the particular stages:
I STAGE – ANDONCLOUD
We successfully introduced the AndonCloud software within a two-week timeframe. With artificial intelligence and cloud computing, AndonCloud predicts the risk of failures and errors, diagnoses anomalies, and forecasts performance indicators.
II STAGE – PDA SOFTWARE (Production Data Acquisition)
In response to the client’s requirement for a solution to monitor the status of specific
tasks within a production element, we introduced a practical tool – a display equipped
with a code scanner. This scanner enables users to input task status, such as “start,” “pause,” and “completion,” based on the task card. As a result, all involved employees can monitor the progress of the process directly from the displays. This real-time visibility allows operators, team leaders, and production managers to keep track of the stage at which a specific element is at any given time. This, in turn, enables them to prepare workstations for the arrival of a specific element, ultimately enhancing the overall efficiency of working with the element and ensuring better control over material flow. As part of further cooperation, the company continues to develop PDA software to adapt it to further needs.
III STAGE – CRANE RESERVATION SYSTEM
After the first implementation, the client, satisfied with the cooperation, reported a different demand. They needed a tool to book and plan the use of the cranes, the availability of which was a bottleneck in several production processes.
We have provided a solution that allows our client to plan the use of the crane for a given task, supplemented by operators in advance. This solution brought satisfactory results and was implemented by the client.
