Friday, July 28, 2017

Proposing a Conceptual Model to Apply OEE to a Continuous Process

Antoine Snyman

INTRODUCTION
Even though the demand for the platinum group metals (PGM) grew roughly 10 times over the last 40 years, the price remained the stable.  Due to this, organisations in the PGM sector are faced with the challenge to produce more with their existing resources and engineering assets.  Naturally these organisations respond with cost reduction; a focus which may have a severely negative impact on the organisation’s performance (Pretorius, 2004) and focus should rather be placed on asset management; however, very few organisations operating in the primary processing stages of the PGM sector pay attention to the measurement of utilisation and performance of assets. 

The objective of this article is to present a model based on the principles Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) to suggest how asset performance can be measured in a continuous process (specifically concentrators) in the PGM sector of a major mining house in South Africa.  The model can be applied to any continuous process.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

MANUFACTURING IN THE CLOUD. Part I: What is cloud computing and why is it being used?

By Goran Novkovic, CQA, CSQE, ITIL, APM, PMP, PEng

This blog is part of a series called Manufacturing in the Cloud. This series aims to assist manufacturing organizations to evaluate how they can overcome challenges and maximize cloud computing benefits. As cloud computing services mature both commercially and technologically, this is likely to become relatively easier to achieve.

MES to Support the Lean Journey

How do your lean culture and your automation and manufacturing IT systems support each other? In some cases, extremely well. If you are not so sure, or if your IT and continuous improvement teams do not agree, we have a great opportunity for you.