This article will discuss:
- How quality performance applications utilize digital-transformation industrial solutions
- How quality performance supports the application of flexible manufacturing
- The benefits of optimized performance in the smart factory
The digitalized factory has provided facility owners with an interconnected floor that is a fertile ground for developing new operational strategies to improve productivity. Implementing quality performance applications using digital industrial solutions is one strategy to use prior to the digitalization of the factory floor.
Quality performance applications leverage digitized processes to reduce the economic costs of delivering quality products or services to customers. They have reduced economic cost by introducing lean manufacturing processes within the factory floor and optimized the performance of individual assets within manufacturing facilities.
Quality performance application and the digitalized factory floor
The digitalized factory floor is one in which digital technology has been used to capture data from operational processes. The interconnected network of digitized assets and processes provides a means to track the key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to individual processes to optimize performance.
KPIs, such as machine utilization rate and the corresponding throughput, highlight the benchmark optimal performance of the individual machine. The captured data also highlight all the environmental factors that enabled operators to achieve the optimal performance benchmark, making it possible to recreate that optimal condition.
The quality performance also optimizes the conditional-monitoring strategies that have been put in place using digitalized technologies. The average condition-monitoring strategy tracks machine data in real-time to identify patterns that can predict faults. Augmenting conditional monitoring with quality-performance strategies ensures that even downtime planned to maintain equipment does not slow down production.
Here, the development of risk-based scheduling comes into play. While predictive maintenance occurs on individual equipment, risk-based schedules reconfigure production plans that sideline the maintained equipment but ensure production goes on uninterrupted. The conventional application of condition monitoring reduces unplanned equipment failure by 75%. Buttressing these efforts with quality performance has been shown to optimize productivity.
The granular approach operational performance takes to optimizing digital processes also plays a role in integrating compliance and control policies at every stage of the production process. In manufacturing niches such as the medical device manufacturing industry, manufacturers must implement quality-control strategies to receive classification labeling from regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration.
Manufacturers in highly regulated niches can implement quality-control systems, which is a subset of quality performance, to monitor manufacturing environments. The quality-control system is implemented using digital-transformation solutions such as IoT devices that can track the condition at which raw materials are delivered or to ensure testing and validation processes are done correctly.
Quality performance application and flexible manufacturing
The ability to handle planned and, most especially, unplanned changes to a manufacturing system requires a level of flexibility that digitalization and operational performance applications enable. The agile manufacturing system relies on digital industrial solutions such as simulation modeling to understand the effects an unplanned change causes.
Quality performance application takes unplanned changes such as a disrupted supply chain or increased customer demand as challenges that must be solved. Granular knowledge of individual machine performance and the capabilities of operators are leveraged to reorganize the factory floor to react to changes in real-time.
The industrial solutions required to support the use of operational-performance strategies to achieve flexibility include both data capturing and analytical tools. The data-capturing tools, which include IoT and edge devices, capture data from manufacturing processes while analytical tools turn raw data into insight for a quality performance application. Analytical tools also integrate unexpected changes as constraints to develop optimized strategies that deliver flexible manufacturing.
The benefits of quality performance application
The advantages of turning deployed digital industrial solutions to support quality performance applications lead to increased revenue generation in the long run, but immediate benefits may include:
- Reduced downtime – The ability to keep track of every operational process with a view to optimizing productivity reduces downtime in diverse aspects of the production cycle. Predictive maintenance reduces equipment downtime while flexible manufacturing reduces production downtime.
- Increased customer service levels – Improved operational processes lead to the production of quality throughput at the speculated delivery timelines customers expect. Meeting customer delivery timelines leads to repeat purchases from customers.
- Taking emotions out of decision-making – Operational performance applications leverage data to provide insight to stakeholders so more accurate decisions are taken. The data-driven plant optimization operational performance enables stakeholders to remove emotions from performance-related problems and look squarely at what the data says.
- Optimized productivity – The result of reduced downtime and making better decisions within the factory floor leads to increased productivity as every aspect of the production cycle is better understood. With quality performance application operators get information to increase throughput and stakeholders gain the insight needed to react to change.
Conclusion
When implementing digital industrial solutions within the factory floor, it is important to also consider the operational performance applications it could support in the future. The quality performance brings together all the data sets collected within the factory floor to improve business outcomes for manufacturers.
