How and Why We Digitized Our Own Production Operations
When plant operations lack visibility and automation in critical production areas, problems like inefficiencies and delays, higher costs and quality control issues often result. Why? Because you can't easily access insights about manufacturing and production processes, equipment status or inventory levels. It’s also more difficult to detect and address problems as they happen.
Without visibility into plant operations, it can be difficult for your team to:
- Monitor and improve quality, performance and availability
- Troubleshoot in a timely manner
- Accurately assess production performance
- Define goals for improvement
- React quickly when equipment problems occur
How Belden Overcame Visibility Challenges
One of the reasons Belden is so good at helping plants overcome visibility problems like these is because we’ve had to find ways to overcome our own operational challenges. (Every manufacturing plant has them!)
“When a machine went down, we had to manually run the numbers and look into the past,” explains Tobias Braunwarth, Belden plant manager. “We were looking at pieces of paper where we manually tracked machine performance hour by hour. We could rarely take proactive actions; we could only be reactive. When production issues arose, we were always behind.”
Plant Operations Now Rely on Data, Not Guessing
To fix this visibility problem in our Neckartenzlingen plant, located in Germany, we decided to call on our own in-house resources and capabilities by tapping into Belden’s Customer Innovation Centers (CICs).
The CIC team began with a Gemba walk, exploring our factory floor with production team members. After that, they conducted a digital maturity assessment to evaluate current automation strategies and opportunities for improvement.
The results were then captured in a report that told us:
- Where we were wasting time and effort on manual work and documentation
- Which blind spots prevented us from tracking critical KPIs
- Exactly where and how to start making improvements
From there, the CIC designed and implemented a resilient network architecture for the Neckartenzlingen plant, including a robust OT backbone and central data hub for management and visualization powered by a third-party vendor.
The next step was improving interoperability by connecting data from each machine. This involved translating serial communication to Ethernet communication and bringing all the data to a centralized location that can act as a single source of truth.
Finally, the CIC team built security and redundancy into our network to support data acquisition, transmission, orchestration and management. As a result, plant operations continue even when part of the network is down.
The Result: Double-Digit OEE Improvements
Thanks to this transformation, our Neckartenzlingen production team now predicts double-digit overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) improvements by year-end. Much of the team’s manual administrative work has also been eliminated, saving operators between 15 and 20 minutes during each eight-hour shift as they prepare for daily meetings.
We also anticipate improvements to other KPIs, including:
- On-time delivery
- Quality
- Customer satisfaction
- Labor productivity
“Many customers face the same issues that Belden’s Neckartenzlingen plant did,” says Harun Ilhan, CIC solution consultant. “What we have done here is something we can do for any customer to help them achieve total visibility and gain a complete view of their plant floor and plant operations.”