Agile Manufacturing - Four components
- 1. Agile Manufacturing GKN Powder Metallurgy & WORKERBASE Consulting Paul Mairl, CDO GKN PM Thorsten Krüger, Co-Founder WORKEBASE Mai 2020
- 2. Different Modules leading into the future of digital manufacturing Many companies are overwhelmed by the wide range of solutions, technologies and possibilities as part of the Industry 4.0 initiatives. Cloud-computing, artificial intelligence, OT vs. IT, big data, machine learning, machine connectivity and more clearly show the potential of these new technologies and the value you could generate. GKN Powder Metallurgy has been focusing over it’s 15 years digital journey to turn technology and solution into new ways of working, operating and organisational model. WORKERBASE provides an innovative software platform to create the Agile Factory. You can benefit from this combined industrial experience in order to accelerate your digital journey and to ensure that you really harvest the benefit of digitalization. Digital Processes Worker empowerment Agile Shop-floor Data-driven operations Digital solutions to extend your existing production system. Benefit from real-time workflows on mobile devices. Focus on employees strengths and continuously upgrade their competencies. Efficient training and onboarding of workers. Competence driven and highly agile and flexible shop-floor organization. Optimal and automatic work coordination. Smart data analytics for actionable insights. Reliable decisions based on real-time facts for predictive operations.
- 3. Plan & coordinate jobs: Ad-hoc planning due to imbalanced processes, differing cycle times, batch sizes Differing sequence of operations, e.g. load balancing of material flow, Tools, WIP, machine setups Current production IT systems not prepared for real-time coordination Huge efforts to implement change request in existing IT systems Digital processes Organizations based on top-down planned processes have limited capability to implement real-time changes. Complex planning of workflows and suboptimal work scheduling results in process inefficiencies, buffers and long waiting times. By extending your existing production system with digital solutions, your employees benefit from real- time workflows. Enable the flexible organization of manual work and increases the efficiency of your production processes, e.g. support calls, material management, machine alarms, data acquisition, quality assurance. Challenges Benefits Workforce utilization: Discover and resolve process bottlenecks on the shop-floor with real-time work coordination. Build resilience: Distribute skills more equally with remote and on-the-job training. Increased flexibility: Flexibly react to changing customer requests and produce more variants in shorter time. React in real-time to disruptions in production. Improved productivity: reduced throughput times, reduced waiting times
- 4. Shortage of skilled people on the market Efficient employee training and best practise exchange Efficient onboarding of new employees Worker empowerment Skill shortage is a huge challenge for manufacturers in many verticals. Ensure your workforce is always well trained and qualified to do the job at hand with skill profiles and digital training on the job. Use our tools for optimal and automatic work coordination. Your employee will benefit from this approach being able to focus on their strength and continuously upgrade their competencies. A high value workplace will be formed and you stay competitive in your market by ensuring you are constantly upskilling your workforce. The Challenge The Benefit Increased employee retention by giving people more development opportunities. Better identification of skill gaps and talents Increased organizational resilience by distributing critical skills among the workforce
- 5. Role and area based organization not designed to quickly react to product and production changes Automation is capable to replace existing work content which requires our workforce to become more flexible and upgrade their competences Shortage of skilled people on the market Multi generation workforce have different requirements Agile shop-floor Today's customer and market requirements drive a much quicker and tailored product and process development. New products need to be implemented at a much quicker speed and full productivity is required straight after start of production. All this leads to a much more complex working environment and requires an agile skill upgrade of your workforce. An organization is required which is capable to adjust quickly in a very active mode and agile approach. The Challenge The Benefit Agile, which is the capability to adapt itself continuously to complex, turbulent and unsecure environment Leaders capable to lead and develop employees/teams to drive towards self managed teams A future oriented and attractive work environment focused on high value activities Develop highly skilled employees capable to utilize new digital technology and be innovative problem solvers Employees acting on data and driving for improved utilisation of resources to harvest the benefits of digitalization
- 6. Transparency about production status KPIs about many machine processes are already known (e.g. SCADA), but visibility about human work KPIs is missing Fact-based organization of human work Data-driven operations Although many manufacturers have already implemented software solutions to support shop-floor processes, most often real-time visibility of the production status is missing. The comprehensive and visualized breakdown of all manual workflows enables process transparency and is the basis for actionable analytics for a smart shop floor management. Bring traditional plan–do–check–adjust improvement cycles to the next level. Our analytics functions help you to understand the root causes of production inefficiencies immediately and allow to implement predictive operations. The Challenge The Benefit Efficient data acquisition with wearable devices 360 degree visibility on production status Visualized analytics help with a better and quicker understanding Data-driven root cause analysis Identification of process bottlenecks Quick and reliable decisions based on real-time facts.