Table of Contents
In a high-churn workforce, onboarding new workers is a challenge. Providing on-the-job guidance in the form of a 100-page technical handbook or conflicting advice from co-workers adds to this struggle.
A comprehensive MES solution provides a single source of truth to support daily shop floor management, 5S evaluations and standardized work. This enables outcomes tracking and escalation from operational levels to PGS management teams.
Visual Work Instructions
Work instructions are a critical component for enabling efficient operations, but too often they are confined to paper. Reliance on printed procedures can result in misinterpretation that slows production down and leads to mistakes and rework.
Visual work instructions allow for clear communication of assembly and production processes to operators, while reducing the time it takes to understand them. They enable you to build faster, increase production efficiency and reduce quality issues.
Create visual guides to all your processes that incorporate videos, images and 3D symbols to make them easy to follow. Take your work instructions to the next level by integrating them into online technical training to onboard new hires and cross-train your team. Capture key information such as quality checks, audits and issue/corrective actions with integrated digital forms that are built directly into your work instructions. Leverage automated approval workflows to ensure that any changes made are immediately reflected across your documentation and processes.
Real-Time Production Boards
For many companies, monitoring production status is a full-time job that requires physical boards kept up to date by staff. Using digital production boards from a Manufacturing Execution System like MV2 eliminates the lag in data collection and provides important information that can be distributed to every employee.
Keeping employees informed is a key step in shop floor excellence. By displaying process-relevant KPIs like cycle times and target/actual comparisons, production management can quickly identify any issues and take the necessary action.
Similarly, with visual scheduling software like Peakboard, production managers can keep their team in the loop on schedule updates. The software allows users to display a calendar-style board with a clear overview of orders or use a Gantt-style planner to easily create and manage schedules. Using an agile scheduling system means that any changes to the schedule are updated on the digital board in real time, eliminating any confusion for the workforce.
Voice Assistance
Voice assistance solutions are reshaping the future of shop floor management by revolutionizing worker capabilities and enhancing operational efficiency. When workers use voice commands or queries, intelligent assistants can instantly respond with relevant information, guidance or even execute tasks. This streamlined interaction eliminates the need for manual paperwork and checklists, increasing productivity, reducing errors and unlocking the full potential of your workforce.
For example, a vaccine manufacturer used voice-enabled technology to improve quality assurance (QA) oversight of two key manufacturing processes. This initiative reduced human-error-caused deviations and improved right-first-time performance in batch records, resulting in greater operational efficiency and compliance with cGMP.
To identify predictors (cognitive and/or linguistic) capable of accounting for an efficient interaction with the voice assistant, several standardized inventories were collected from the participants. Then, the results were associated using multiple linear regression models.
Shop Floor Integration
Shop floor integration enables you to get important data from your factory’s shop floor operations directly into your system without a lag. It eliminates the need for employees to manually collect and route information from the MES to your PLM.
A vaccine manufacturer, for example, had to reduce recurring human-error-caused deviations from two key manufacturing operations. It also needed to improve right-first-time performance in batch records. These were not easy goals to achieve with traditional metrics.
In this research, we developed a data-driven decision-making system to enhance production shop floor excellence and industrial sustainability in Industry 4.0 working environment through lean, green, and smart manufacturing concepts. This system allows the shop floor management team to eliminate waste within available resources through an efficient optimization of production processes. Moreover, it helps to enhance productivity levels by eliminating non-value-added activities. The comparison analysis with previous research results demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. It can help you achieve production excellence in less time with a more sustainable operational performance.