Achieving Shop Floor Connectivity and Visibility Through Digitization
JUMP TO: Customer | Challenge | Discovery | Solution | Results
Customer
Belden partners with customers across diverse markets, from healthcare to industrial manufacturing, to help them modernize their mission-critical infrastructure. As it helps customers solve their biggest challenges, Belden is also on a mission to digitally transform its own plants and operations.
Included among Belden’s global production facilities is a century-old plant in Neckartenzlingen, Germany , that produces connectors and switches for robust, reliable industrial networks.
Challenge
The Neckartenzlingen plant lacked visibility and automation in critical production areas. Many of its machines, including assembly stations and stamping and folding equipment, required manual intervention that interfered with productivity and increased costs and labor requirements.
The absence of visibility made it difficult to monitor and improve quality, performance and availability, with too much time spent on troubleshooting.
In daily shop-floor meetings, operators and experts discussed potential root causes of production problems, but the process was subjective and based on visual observation. They were not able to problem-solve in a systematic way; they were checking machines issues manually. Instead, the team wanted access to real-time data from machines and sensors so they could continually monitor performance and verify whether countermeasures worked.
Employees also lacked a strong grasp on production performance. As a result, they couldn’t easily define goals for improvement. They weren’t sure whether they were collecting the right data to accurately calculate overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and insufficient data quality led to incorrect assumptions that created recurring issues and longer periods of downtime. “For example, if there are no orders planned for a machine, then its lack of operation should not have a negative impact on OEE,” Tobias Braunwarth, plant manager, points out. “We want high-quality data that supports our decisions on how we can improve our operational performance on a constant basis.”
And they couldn’t react quickly when equipment problems arose. As a result, downtime occurred more often than the team preferred, which cost valuable time and money.
“When a machine went down, we had to manually run the numbers and look into the past,” explains Braunwarth. “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.”
Discovery
The production team in Neckartenzlingen is always looking for ways to continuously improve operations. They knew about the digital transformation happening at other Belden plants, such as those in the United States and Canada , and they wanted to do something similar.
Calling on its own in-house resources and capabilities, the team tapped into Belden’s Customer Innovation Centers (CICs). These hubs are places of co-innovation, where Belden works closely with customers to develop, test and validate digital-transformation solutions. Instead of working with an external customer, however, the CIC team would this time solve problems within its own company.
The CIC team began its work with a Gemba walk, exploring the factory floor with production team members to:
- Identify pain points
- Understand current operations and processes
- Document existing assets and equipment
- Pinpoint production challenges
There was lots of room for improvement. While the plant assumed its equipment ran at 75% OEE, the CIC determined that 60% was a more accurate number.
Next came a digital maturity assessment to evaluate current automation strategies and opportunities for improvement.
The results of the Gemba walk and assessment were captured in a report, along with an analysis of potential solutions to improve digital transformation. The report outlined the manual work and documentation happening throughout the plant, as well as blind spots that prevented tracking of critical KPIs, such as on-time delivery and labor productivity. It also noted the nonexistence of connectivity, including legacy machinery that lacked Ethernet interfaces and stalled automation.
In addition, the report acted as a roadmap that explains exactly where and how to start making improvements, outlining each step in the digital transformation process.
“We found that they weren’t able to rely on data at all,” says Julien Auger, CIC digital automation consultant manager. “They had to instead rely on thinking or feelings instead.”
Within the CIC’s Validation Lab and Proof of Concept Lab, simulations were run to validate designs and verify that solutions would work in the plant as planned before they were rolled out onto a live factory floor.
Solution
To improve visibility and data analysis, 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.
To establish a network connection to each of the machines, the CIC combined different capabilities from Belden’s solution landscape, integrating robust and ruggedized hardware with tailored software to create comprehensive network connectivity.
The next step was improving interoperability by connecting data from each machine, regardless of protocols. This involved translating serial communication to Ethernet communication and bringing data to a centralized location that acts as a single source of truth. Because every machine has its own architecture, the CIC team took a unique approach with each piece of equipment.
Finally, the CIC team built security and redundancy into the network to support data acquisition, transmission, orchestration and management, even if part of the network is down.
“Many customers in various industrial markets 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.”
Results
Thanks to this transformation, the production team predicts double-digit OEE improvements by year-end. They also anticipate improvements to other KPIs, including on-time delivery, quality, customer satisfaction and labor productivity and satisfaction.
Emir Baydur, production manager, has noticed an awakened interest in digitalization across his team. With displays mounted throughout the plant, workers can see uptime and performance in real-time and frequently ask questions about improvements.
When the operations team meets to go over daily machine data, they know exactly how equipment is functioning and how production levels are impacted. By making pain points visible, corrective decisions can be made to improve machine performance. Employees understand the causes of operational issues and how to respond, which has improved uptime and maintenance. Internal communication has also improved since the team can now discuss production using data everyone understands and trusts.
“So much of the administrative work has also been removed,” says Baydur. “We were writing things down and making so many notes, and this change has saved operators between 15 and 20 minutes every day, or 3% to 4% of an eight-hour shift, just to prepare for daily meetings.”
After seeing the impact of visibility on operations, the team is preparing to capture even more kinds of data to power insight into and improvement of more KPIs.
“It’s like a never-ending story,” says Auger. “The team can always be improving, and so can their network. They can add new features, add new equipment and add more data as their needs change and customer demands shift. Now they are able to level up everything.”