Greater Mobility, More Data, Less Paper

The problem was about collecting work-in-progress data to help deliver finished goods in time and eliminating paper on the shop floor near the Quality Points (totems along the shop floor with instruction sets, paper forms, library, and manuals), near production lines, or that needed to be handled by the employees.

The project was aimed at quickly collecting work-order data from the shop floor and communicating it to the company’s ERP system. The goal was to react faster to delays or unforeseen events. To accomplish that it was necessary to adopt a scheduling process supported by software, to give operators an integrated system to collect data on mobile devices.

A second goal was to avoid using paper on the shop floor. The Quality Control system was managed through printed instructions and paper forms used to collect data and issues. A fully new QC mode in ERP was to be developed to deliver and collect data by the MES system.

The modules integration and the flexibility of the Ignition platform let us build an application that:

• Offered a single integrated tool to reach the two goals
• Provided easy adoption in production
• Had a fast return on investment
• Was bidirectional and integrated with the legacy data

The operation launch procedure shows the setup instruction to the operator in the PDF reader module. Using an Ignition form on his/her tablet, the operator can submit quality issues directly during setup or from the run-monitoring screen without duplicate inputs. The line's responsible can define the working crew during the launch of an operation. The complete log of each phase is stored in the database for tracking and performance analysis.

The uniqueness of the Ignition platform was the licensing model, the easy way it can be used to adopt an ISA 95 standard and the complete integration with the Industry 4.0 technology and philosophy.

Dani was so satisfied with the MES implementation that employees fully adopted it during design, development, and deployment phases. A good example of that is that the project has been named by employees with the word Linkki (which in Finnish means “link”). Also, the deployment in the different production area has been done by Dani’s personnel.

Next steps will be the connection to the machines’ PLC and SCADA to collect even more data, the implementation of a module to trace R&D small batches, and to deploy on new sites.