Wednesday, 27 April 2016

The problems and solutions of Cellular Manufacturing

Nothing is more frustrating to a manager than a department which is failing to meet productivity demands. Various reasons can be stated as to why a department is failing. These companies are failing to meet the demands of their customers on a regular basis. But, one reason can be that many of the manufacturers in the country are struggling with an aging system and Cellular Manufacturing: One-Piece Flow for Workteams can be the solution. Machinery being scattered throughout the department, or even shop, with unrelated jobs running side by side and parts not located by machines can call for great problems and AIAG Books can help to give you a solution. Standard work for the Shopfloor is also a good guide.
Tooling or fixtures stacked away from machines and even difficult to locate, can lead to a department that struggles or even fails to meet customer demands.
Essential ways to tackle the problem.
After learning about all the problems, let’s learn about an effective way to eliminating these kinds of problems. So, to make a department run more efficiently you have to utilize the departmental cellular manufacturing. It should also be known that it is definitely an undertaking which involves the total commitment of management, quality control, shipping, assembly and manufacturing the employees too. The answers can be given through a more efficient running and productive department representation.
How should the construction be set up?
A working cell should include selection of area to set up the cell while on production. You can use a mock up using cardboard templates of machines. You can use them and their placements and collect data of machine run times. Employees can be used for a walk through of production should be studied and data collected. A positive and a negative input from the employees should be taken and it is important too. After researching the data collected from the walk through you could meet again and perform mock up for each change. You could also do that for each study. The final one should involve employee works to be studied by the department.

Monday, 25 April 2016

Basics of Overall Equipment Effectiveness or OEE

The second of the eight pillars of TPM is autonomous maintenance. One of the parts of the autonomous maintenance is OEE for Operators: Overall Equipment Effectiveness. It follows a structured approach to increase the skill levels of personnel whivh people will understand. They will also manage and improve their equipment and processes. Identifying Waste on the Shopfloor is a good guide book. The goal is to change operators from being reactive to working in a more proactive way and the Cmti handbook will help you a lot. To achieve optimal conditions that eliminate minor equipment you have to work hard a lot. It shall in turn stop and reduce breakdowns and defects.
More on Overall Equipment Effectiveness.
According to availability, performance and quality the concept of OEE or Overall Equipment Effectiveness breaks the performance of a manufacturing unit into three distinct and measurable components. All the components, individually or not, points to an aspect of the process. It can be targeted for improvement or just casually. The principle of OEE may also be applicable to any individual work center. It may also be rolled up to department or levels of a plant. This is a tool that also allows drilling down extremely specific analysis. They can be part number, shift or any of several other parameters. It is quiet unlikely that any manufacturing process can run at complete OEE. Hence, many manufacturers are benchmarking their industry. It is to set a challenging target where the 85% is not really uncommon.
The process rate of the Overall Equipment Effectiveness.
The performance portion of the OEE Metric is also known as the process rate. It is a series of calculation which represents the speed at which the work center runs. The center usually runs as a percentage of its designated speed. Additionally, the performance metric is a pure measurement of speed. The speed that is designed to differentiate among the effects of quality and availability is mentioned here. Losses incurred due to wasted performance, often called speed losses, are often not determined. A common approach is to assign the unknown losses as speeded ones.

Things to maintain during Autonomous maintenance for operators

Autonomous maintenance for operators is the independent maintenance that is carried out by the operators. These operators themselves maintain the machines without the help of dedicated maintenance technicians. Total productive maintenance or TPM is much like TQM or total quality management where this concept is the core. Shopfloor series books can give you a guide to this principle. But, the concept of TPM will give more responsibility and authority to the operators in comparison to TQM. It releases the technical personnel to do more improvement in the works. You can easily buy standards online in India.
Cleaning and inspection during maintenance.
For the autonomous maintenance, this is the first stage to begin with a similar purpose like a shine stage. Operators remove all the dirt and grime from the machines. This uncovers and highlights any problems within the machine and it is not meant for the perfection. The machine needs to be taken out of production. For this all the fluids are to be drained and covers are to be removed. It is done so that every part of the machine is cleaned and inspected. The grime of past years has to be removed and the machine has to be brought back to how it was when it was first purchased. A thorough inspection further reveals each and every damage or wear of the machine. The cleaning and inspection should be done by the operators and maintenance crew. They are responsible for the machine. They will become more familiar with the machines details. Hence, they will be able to see where dirt accumulates and the problems occurring due to it.
Removal of contamination while the process of Autonomous maintenance.
When the operators clean and inspect the machines it is your duty as a maintenance staff to look at where the dirt that is being removed is coming from. Whether it is being produced inside the machine or it is coming into the machine from outside should be the major concern. They should seek to remove or minimize these sources of deadly contaminations. It forces us in to cleaning our machines.