How Lean Six Sigma Can Unleash the Potential of Industrial Data
Lean Six sigma has been a game changer in each and every field for improving the performance and removing the unwanted process. There are numerous tools nowadays which can be leveraged to increase the productivity of the machines. But it has to be intelligent enough to rectify the variations automatically without any human interventions, this is where the machines talk with each other(M2M). As we discussed one of the use cases with respect to DMAIC tool in my previous blog let’s look at one of the lean manufacturing tools.
TPM is a process of improving the quality of production by enhancing the way machines work, industrial equipments, sensors etc. By improving the efficiency and reliability of the machines the total downtime of a production plant can be reduced to a large extent. A team based factor known as OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) which includes quality, performance of the machine and availability is often used for the calculation of TPM. Preventive Maintenance and Predictive Maintenance is also used in this tool for finding criticality of the machines & manufacturing equipments.
OEE = Quality of the machine* Performance Efficiency*Availability of the Machine Now these parameters are calculated based on various factors retrieved from the production floor as well as maintenance sheets. Let’s look at one of the use cases where this tool can be implemented
Considering a part of a small manufacturing industry where blocks(any material like plastic or molten steel ) are collected in a conveyor belt and passed through a hydraulic machine which compresses it and flattens the blocks as shown above. These plates are further used as raw material for production purpose. Each of these processes is divided into four steps: Step1: Blocks are placed in a conveyor through a robotic arm. Step2: Blocks are moved in a conveyor belt and the Counters keep on counting the blocks that are passed. Step3: A Hydraulic Press which transforms the blocks into plates. Step4: The flattened plates further used as raw material for other production. This is just a example of a manufacturing plant where the flattened plates of any material is used as a raw material. Besides implementing the TPM tool we also need to ensure that the whole process functions intelligently i.e. M2M.
In Step1, the robotic arm places the blocks as soon as the previous blocks starts moving in the conveyor belt. The hydraulic press would start compressing the blocks and transforms it into plates at a certain speed.
