PUNCH PRESS ACTIVE QUALITY

Our client manufactures box cutter knives and knife assemblies. Their hydraulic press stamps out razor blades at a rate of 350 blades per minute from a massive coil of steel. At this high production rate, many thousands of parts would fail quality standards when the die is damaged or when the die is not configured perfectly during the setup process. A slightly less than perfect setup would allow metal fragments to hang up in the die and cause damage to or destroy the die. Variations in the steel coils can cause die cut parts to fail quality standards.

Core Insight Systems coupled a high-speed vision inspection system with a UI-Node. For each part, this custom system inspects 11 different critical measurements and shapes. For any non-conforming point of inspection, the UI-Node streams the data to our Cloud platform. Once in our Cloud, Core Trace’s real-time Pareto displays the top five (5) non-conforming quality metrics. In addition to a quality dashboard, Core Trace automatically keeps their leadership team constantly connected to their press’ performance with both local and web-based notifications. When personnel cannot immediately react to the data, Core Trace automatically shuts down the press after a certain number of non-conforming inspections are captured within a predefined period of time.

As a result of installing our inspection system, the company was able to:

-Prevent premature equipment failures. Within the first three day of using Core Trace, the system detected an excessive number of quality defects and automatically shut down the press on two different occasions. Just these two automatic shutdowns, saved the customer of over $70,000 in unexpected equipment failure expenses.
-Reduce unexpected downtime
-Improve uptime
-Increase factory wide efficiency
-Improve product quality
-Reduce possibility of customer complaints and returns

REAL-TIME ORDER FULFILLMENT

Production Planners for one of our Aerospace clients wanted to know machine up-time and up-to-the-minute production volumes for each one of their 14 different multi-spindle threading machines. With machines ranging in age from 50 years old to brand new in 2017, cooling oil floods each cutting spindle location the last position where the part is extracted and ejected onto a slide. The slide guides the part out of the machine and into an external basket. At the end of the shift or at the end of the order, baskets are manually transferred to a centrally located weigh scale where the fastener count is documented.

To accurately record the production volumes, Core Insight designed a multi-sensor solution capable of detecting the finished part, while being completely submerged in cooling oil, just before being released from the extraction mechanism. This common sensor configuration worked on each one of the 14 different machines and allowed Core Trace to tracks real-time production and provide companywide notifications each time a machine was stopped for a specific length of time. With just the click of a mouse, Production Planners received an accurate product count for any machine within the department.

As a result of our custom part detection system, the company was able to:

-Achieve the highest order fulfillment rate in their 50 years of operation
-Improve Machine Update by eliminating the operator’s requirement to leave the machine and weigh parts.
-Reduce Machine idle time by detecting zero production due to a jam up in the raw material in-feed system.
-Improve product yield (consumed raw material inventory versus finished parts counts) by over 50%.

DATA LATENCY

High volume manufacturing is a challenge but when your manufacturing business is in the low margin lumber industry, every moment of production is precious. Our lumber industry customer produces products for Do It Yourself (DIY) stores across North America and their team would manually document all aspects of production, from schedule adherence to quality rejects, for each shift of operation. This documentation could take up to three days to make its way from the production log books to the company’s business systems.

Core Insight developed a method to track incoming raw material, record the number of quality rejects at two different manual inspection stations, and track inventory coming off of their most critical production line. Core Trace looked at both the beginning and he end of this production line to eliminate the manual data collection process. At the start of the line, Core Insight outfitted their operator with a barcode scanner capable of scanning both a Raw Material barcode and a Production workorder barcode, and we installed a near the entrance of the first saw to measure throughput. Core Trace actively measured the difference in the amount of raw material supplied to the line and the amount of material fed into the first saw. The difference in these two numbers was equal to the amount of quality rejects removed by the operator. At the end of the line, Core Trace interfaced directly with their automated strapping operation to track the production of finish product. Core Insight also provided Core Trace’s sitewide paging system to keep the forklift driver connected to the process.

As a result of our solution, the company was able to:

-Improve raw material yield by providing immediate Quality Adherence results to each of their raw material suppliers
-Reduce raw material downtime by over 15% by alerting the forklift operator to a low infeed instead of waiting until the production line shut down due to no raw material

-Recover over 6 salaried labor hours a day and apply that labor towards improving the process
-Improve throughput by actively holding each production crew responsible for meeting production targets.