Intelligent software platforms and hardware must supplement the widest supply chain context to maintain optimum manufacturing efficiency. Report by William Nelson, President at E80 Group North America.
In my 20+ years of experience in the automation industry, I’ve seen many companies latch on to another company’s ideas hoping to take advantage of a trend and revenue opportunity. Most of these adventures fail. Why? Could it be the ideas being copied do not form part of a company’s DNA, there is no fertile intellectual property base to grow from, there is not a solid platform of experience gained through years of successes and difficulties? Automation isn’t about just building hardware.
In past articles, we have established what we have been able to execute so far:
- Just about any function in material handling can be automated cost-effectively.
- Automation systems allow managers to focus on productivity, efficiency, and maintenance.
- Automation systems do multiple tasks in an orchestrated way 24/7/365, delivering goods to the right place at the right time.
- Intelligent software platforms create robust decision-making structures that are as adaptable as they are repeatable.
- Automation systems that are scalable, meaning they can grow and evolve as a plant changes over time.
- Safety developments that go even beyond the regulation’s standards, and low-noise operations, enhance the workplace experience.
Doesn’t everyone require the same essential functions as above?
We move input materials in, feed raw materials to production, efficiently manage inventory and ship finished goods out. Yet the challenge isn’t in identifying what to do. Instead, it’s in knowing how to do it. This is where suppliers’ experience, expertise, and capabilities come into play.
First-time experimenters with automation may decide that an A-to-B repetitive task may be ripe for automation because it’s easy to execute and costs very little, but this can create future roadblocks if automation is not considered in a global context.
Consider it the equivalent to bolting a rewinder to your plant floor without any regard to where the parent rolls are coming from or the location of your future packaging lines. You just wouldn’t do it.
But what if we take this case one step further? What if we think about a future in which we manage all the material flows employing multiple types of automation?
I am talking about in-coming raw materials, line supplies, finished goods warehousing, and trailer loading as a desired future state of your plant. What if that allows a combination of disparate vehicle types to work collaboratively within a single area, like bees around a hive, while still ensuring the safest of all work environments?
What if all these simultaneous functions could be managed from a control room, PC or tablet?
Machine-sellers and system suppliers
In essence, we’ve learned to separate the machine-sellers from the systems providers.
The DNA of a system provider reveals itself very quickly through the questions raised, the unique skill-sets of its people, and most particularly the array of its products. In reality, automation is a SOFTWARE play based on an in-depth understanding of what key factors are difference-makers. As the saying goes, “you don’t know what you don’t know” and this is often the case with automation. But to an educated eye, what good looks like is very obvious. To put this in context, what if I were to tell you I could save you 20 seconds per operation over 7,500 operations per day over 365 days per year. Would that proposition interest you?
Think big – dig deep
Even if you do not plan on total automation in the short term, you can develop an automation roadmap that will allow you to coordinate all the functions of your plant – those automated and those not.
This is possible through an integrated software platform that interfaces with plant ERP, all production systems from third parties, manual operations, and warehouses. In essence, the decisions regarding the necessary actions to: feed lines, pull products, manage warehouses and ships so they are all coordinated by one brain capable of determining priorities from hundreds of scenarios, while directing the vehicle assets to interact efficiently among themselves.
To name just a few benefits of an integrated system composed of smart decision-making software and vehicle management:
- System throughput guaranteed tied to meaningful KPIs.
- Single durable interface for performance monitoring, adjusting, and troubleshooting.
- Scalability to grow and adapt the system to changing requirements without complicated coordination and contracting of multiple vendors.
- Safety improvement due to ground-breaking technology integrated into system functionality.
E80 Group calls its software platform SM.I.LE80. It has evolved over many years of cumulative experience where orchestrated system performance management has opened exciting efficiency and flexibility opportunities that have increased performances that multiply year-over-year due to the durability of an integrated system approach.
It takes an ecosystem
Your return on safety, customer satisfaction, and productivity really depends on how you automate – and with whom.
Choose the right partner willing to dig in and get to know your business, the partner that has the experience to guide you through your process requirements, the capability to simulate your flows with the highest accuracy.
Last but not least, choose a supplier that stands by its solutions with an overall system guarantee – and KPI’s from end-to-end that has automation in their DNA.
This article was written for TWM by William Nelson, President at E80 Group North America.
