Making the Production Asset Lifecycle Smarter – Part 3

Authored by John Clemons, MESA Marketing Committee Chair, based on an interview with Ananth Seshan, MESA Model Sub-Committee Member 

One of the chapters of the new MESA Smart Manufacturing Model covers the production asset lifecycle and how we can make the production asset lifecycle smarter. Here’s a look at a few final smart ideas included on this topic in the new MESA Smart Manufacturing model.

Energy Intensity

Energy consumption is always a major cost of a production asset; however, more than energy consumption, energy intensity must be measured and optimized. Energy intensity is the metric that measures per unit energy consumption in the presence of varying production demand.

Traditionally, energy consumption is rarely tracked at the asset level and energy intensity is rarely calculated at the asset level. Usually because of the difficulty of getting the actual energy usage information for the asset.

With the advent of Smart Manufacturing, the IIoT, and Smart Sensors, it’s now possible to get energy consumption data and production data directly from the asset. This means that energy usage and energy intensity can be captured and calculated in real-time which provides the data to optimize the energy usage and energy intensity of an asset.

Maintenance Personnel

MTTR, mean time to repair, must be reduced. To achieve this, the repair must be performed effectively and efficiently. Most times, maintenance personnel identify the failure only after arriving at the asset, have to evaluate if spare parts are required, and then have to get them from the warehouse. Once the spare parts are replaced, the asset has to be tested and once it’s satisfactory, the maintenance personnel return to the main office to enter the records and close the work order.

With the advent of Smart Manufacturing practices, the above activities can be automated and a significant reduction in the time to repair can be achieved. Mobile apps can make the maintenance personnel aware of the maintenance problem along with the fault, or item that must be repaired, and the remedial actions to be taken, long before they arrive at the asset.

Additionally, Smart Manufacturing approaches such as online work instructions in the form of documents, drawings, videos, pictures, manuals, live stream connections to domain experts, and augmented reality technology can also significantly reduce time and effort during repair and all help reduce and optimize the MTTR metric.

Spare Parts

Spare parts are one of the keys to the smooth operation of the asset and to ensuring minimal latency during repair. While stock outs are not desirable, excessive or unnecessary storage of spare parts are also very costly.

With new Smart Manufacturing practices, the frequency of movement of spare parts can be monitored in real time. The optimal ordering of the spare parts can be triggered by the Smart Manufacturing application by reconciling the velocity of the movement of the spare parts against the available stock at any time, in real time.

These are the final smart ideas I wanted to mention that are included on the topic of the Production Asset Lifecycle in the new MESA Smart Manufacturing model.

Stay tuned for more looks at other chapters from the new MESA Start Manufacturing Model.

Enhance your exposure by sponsoring the MESA Smart Manufacturing Model. 

Making the Production Asset Lifecycle Smarter – Part 2

Authored by John Clemons, MESA Marketing Committee Chair, based on an interview with Ananth Seshan, MESA Model Sub-Committee Member 

I’ve mentioned before that one of the chapters of the new MESA Smart Manufacturing Model covers the production asset lifecycle and how we can make the production asset lifecycle smarter. Let’s look at a few more of the smart ideas included on this topic in the new MESA Smart Manufacturing model.

Asset Optimization

Monitoring an asset’s health, avoiding unexpected asset failures, and analyzing the root causes of failures, all go a long way toward getting an asset to perform effectively; however, there’s more to it than just that. Ultimately, you want the asset to always run optimally. To ensure the asset runs optimally all the time requires a lot more than just making sure it does fail unexpectedly.

The best way to optimize the performance of an asset is through a digital twin. A digital twin is a digital representation of a physical asset. There’s lots of variables that affect the optimal performance of an asset -processes, products, workloads, ambient conditions, etc. all affect the optimal performance.

Using a digital twin allows you to analyze the above factors and determine their affect on the asset. The digital twin allows you to try multiple strategies to optimize the performance. A digital twin in real-time allows you to dynamically optimize the performance of the asset, while it’s in operation, in the middle of these dynamic conditions.

Asset Usage

It’s been difficult to get accurate data on the actual usage of an asset. Many times, the data is supposed to be manually entered into an EAM or CMMS type of system, which allows for human error.

With Smart Manufacturing and the IIoT, accurate data on asset usage can be recorded directly from the controllers and/or PLCs of the assets using interoperable, open-connectivity standards such as OPC. This data can then be updated directly into the EAM or CMMS system. This means you now have accurate asset usage information in your EAM or CMMS which is right where you need it to support your preventative and predictive RCM regimens.

Under Maintenance and Over Maintenance

Under maintenance occurs when an asset is used more than was planned. It can be very costly because it means that the asset is not getting the maintenance it requires which translate to lower asset performance, more product quality issues, and more unplanned downtime.

Over maintenance occurs when an asset is used less than was planned. It can also be costly because it means you’re spending a lot of money on maintenance that’s not needed.

Getting accurate information on asset usage means that traditional time-based preventative maintenance regimens can be completely replaced with usage-based preventative maintenance.

Condition-Based Maintenance

Smart Manufacturing and the IIoT support true condition-based maintenance.

With Smart Manufacturing and the IIoT you can now monitor the conditions of the asset, in real-time, and decide to perform maintenance on the asset only when the conditions warrant.

This is usually the best approach by far because it pretty much eliminates both over maintenance and under maintenance and allows the right maintenance to be applied at the right time to the right asset, in real-time based on the actual conditions of the asset.

This is just a few of the point in the chapter that covers the production asset lifecycle and how we can make the production asset lifecycle smarter.

Stay tuned for more from the new MESA Start Manufacturing Model.

Enhance your exposure by sponsoring the MESA Smart Manufacturing Model. 

Making the Production Asset Lifecycle Smarter – Part 1

Authored by John Clemons, MESA Marketing Committee Chair, based on an interview with Ananth Seshan, MESA Model Sub-Committee Member 

MESA International is developing a new MESA Smart Manufacturing model. It covers a lot of ground and includes chapters on the lifecycles of supply chain, personnel, order to cash, product, production, and production assets.

The fundamental purpose of the new MESA Smart Manufacturing Model is to be prescriptive of what Smart Manufacturing does by providing recommendations on how people can be smart in their manufacturing endeavors.

One of the chapters covers the production asset lifecycle and how to make it smarter. Below are a few ideas that are included on this topic in the new MESA Smart Manufacturing model.

Monitoring Asset Health

It seems that it’s always been difficult to accurately track the health of assets in real time. People have been able to track a few critical parameters, but have been unable to truly track all the parameters required to get a complete picture of the health of the asset; however; thanks to smart manufacturing, it’s now possible to get the data necessary from an asset to really understand its health through the IIo, new sensor technology, and new device and communications technology.

This data can then be contextualized and transformed into information that’s extremely useful in understanding and managing the asset’s health. This information can be made available in real time for immediate decision-making and for historical analyses. All for the purpose of monitoring the complete health of an asset.

Avoiding Unexpected Failures

Unplanned downtimes are always costly. They need to be understood, predicted, and avoided if possible. The first step to avoiding downtime is to understand the symptoms of the failures. To truly understand the symptoms of failures, it takes a lot of data – data that hasn’t always been available, until now.

With the technologies of smart manufacturing, the IIoT, new sensors, and new devices and communications, it’s now possible to get the data necessary from an asset to understand the symptoms of a failure, and to analyze the data to get to the root cause of the failure.

Having the data and contextualizing the data, allows for the opportunity to monitor the symptoms of known failures, perform descriptive and predictive analyses on the symptoms, and then take actions to correct the situation before the asset failure occurs.

Root Causes of Asset Failure

Detecting symptoms of failures is important to detecting potential failures and preventing them from occurring, but to truly understand what’s going on it’s necessary to get beyond the symptoms to the root causes.

Smart Manufacturing, along with the IIoT, finally provides enough data to dig deep into the root causes of the failures. This will lead to understanding new patterns of failures and understanding new patterns of symptoms and the root causes of the symptoms and the failures.

Above are just a few of the highlights in the production asset lifecycle chapter in the new MESA model. The new MESA Smart Manufacturing Model is prescriptive and provides recommendations on how to be smart in manufacturing endeavors, including how to make the production asset lifecycle smarter. 

Stay tuned for more from the new MESA Start Manufacturing Model.

Enhance your exposure by sponsoring the MESA Smart Manufacturing Model. 

The Order to Cash Lifecycle and the New MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model

 Authored by John Clemons, MESA Marketing Committee Chair, based on an interview with Darren Riley, MESA Model Sub-Committee Member 

MESA International is developing a new Smart Manufacturing Model. It’s going to cover a lot of ground from ERP, MES, and Control Systems, to IIoT, AI, AR/VR, Big Data, Digital Twins, Digital Threads, and a whole lot more.

The fundamental purpose of the new Smart Manufacturing Model is not to merely be descriptive in explaining what Smart Manufacturing is about, but to be prescriptive by providing specific recommendations on how people can be smart in their manufacturing endeavors.

The new Smart Manufacturing Model is based on the idea of the lifecycles of the manufacturing processes. One of the key lifecycles that is featured is the order to cash lifecycle. There will be a lot of meat in the chapter on the order to cash lifecycle and it’s worthwhile to a look at just a few of topics covered in the chapter.

For the new Smart Manufacturing Model, the order to cash lifecycle starts with the output of the long-term and mid-term planning (i.e., Planned Orders) and begins with these as inputs to production planning and the eventual creation of production orders. (For the operations space this is the beginning of the cycle whereas ERP sees the Order to Cash cycle starting when the customer places the order.) 

There’s several key constraints that are part of the manufacturing side, when I need to produce the product being ordered, of the order to cash lifecycle. Do I have the materials I need for these orders? Do I have the personnel I need for these orders? Do I have the capacity I need for these orders? The new Smart Manufacturing Model will help us learn how to be smart in making sure we have the materials, the personnel, and the capacity we need for the orders we have.

But, the new Smart Manufacturing Model doesn’t stop there, because the order to cash lifecycle is more complicated than that. There’s more to it than just having materials, personnel, and capacity. It has to be the right materials, personnel, and capacity, and the right combination of materials, personnel, and capacity. Having this right combination is all about the synchronization of materials, personnel, and capacity, such that they’re exactly what’s needed in the right place and at the right time to make the required products. The new Smart Manufacturing Model will help us learn how to be smart in synchronizing our materials, personnel, and capacity.

One of the common issues that hinder this synchronization is that not all required information is available in the same system at the same time. There’s just too many systems in place that have part of the picture. That means synchronization of materials, personnel, and capacity is a lot harder and takes a lot longer than it should. The solution is to bring this information together in a much more organized and unified approach so that synchronization can happen very, very quickly.

Because in the end, the order to cash lifecycle is really all about agility. How agile is the order to cash lifecycle? How agile is the synchronization of materials, personnel, and capacity? How agile is the order to cash lifecycle when it comes to responding to weekly, daily, or hourly changes in demand?

It’s only with the agility to change quickly – to adjust materials, to adjust personnel, and adjust capacity – that it’s possible to get beyond synchronization and ultimately get to the optimization of the order to cash lifecycle. The new Smart Manufacturing Model will help us learn to be smart in achieving synchronization, in achieving agility, and in using that agility to get from synchronization to optimization. That’s a tall order, but that’s what the new Smart Manufacturing Model is all about – being prescriptive and helping us learn how to be smart as we improve the order to cash lifecycle.

This is what’s going to be in just one chapter of the new MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model. This chapter is on the order to cash lifecycle and there’s chapters on many other key aspects of manufacturing operations. The chapters aren’t academic and they’re not merely descriptive. They’re practical and prescriptive, dealing with how we can be smart in dealing with the real world.

Stay tuned for more looks into chapters of the new MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model.

Enhance your exposure by sponsoring the MESA Smart Manufacturing Model.

The Personnel Lifecycle and the New MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model

Authored by John Clemons, MESA Marketing Committee Chair, based on an interview with Chris Monchinski, MESA Manufacturing Analytics Working Group Chair 

It should not be new news to anyone that MESA International is developing a new Smart Manufacturing Model. It covers a lot of ground with chapters on the lifecycles of supply chain, personnel, order to cash, product, production, and production assets.

The fundamental purpose of the new Smart Manufacturing Model is not to be descriptive in explaining what Smart Manufacturing does, but to be prescriptive by providing recommendations on how people can be smart in their manufacturing endeavors.

I recently got a chance to talk with Chris Monchinski, who’s heading up the Personnel Lifecycle team, to talk about what’s going to be in the personnel chapter of the new MESA Smart Manufacturing Model.

He said, “We’ve been managing the personnel lifecycle from hire to retire since the original industrial revolution. And, for the most part, we’ve been doing it reasonably well. What’s new is that we now have the enabling technologies we need to really do the job right. We have the technologies we need to streamline and optimize the task so that it’s not a burden on the organization and it’s continued to be done as well or better than it ever has.”

That’s very true. There’s no lack of technologies, very good technologies, that support the personnel lifecycle from hire to retire. Technologies that really do a good job of managing the lifecycle easily and effectively. But what makes it “smart”? I asked Chris this question.

He answered, “What makes it smart is that we can now integrate the personnel lifecycle in with the other manufacturing lifecycles. We can integrate these personnel technologies into the technologies of the other manufacturing lifecycles.”

That means we can now get an integrated view of training records. We can understand the full range of skillsets needed for manufacturing and who has and doesn’t have those skillsets. That means we can get the right people for the right job at the right time. And we can know who’s certified and who’s not for a specific task.

All that means that we should be much smarter at evaluating skillsets, at using people to improve productivity in the right ways at the right times, and should be much better at the planning and scheduling of personnel.

I asked Chris what business benefits we gain from all this. He replied, “The business benefits are tremendous. For the first time we get a thorough understanding of the skill gaps that exist. We get a good understanding of the training gaps. We finally understand the importance of change management and where it works well and doesn’t work well. We get a good understanding how well our training programs are working and where we need additional training and such. We finally get to implement HPWS and P4V programs the right way – the smart way. All because we finally have the personnel technologies we need and can integrate those technologies with the manufacturing technologies to get a complete solution.”

Again, that’s all true. With the technologies that enable the personnel lifecycle, and the integration of that lifecycle into the entire manufacturing process, we can now understand the skills required for a task and the people who have those skillsets. We can, for the first time, start to optimize the people as a critical resource, and maybe for the first time, really start to use people effectively and efficiently.

This is what’s going to be in just one chapter of the new MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model. This chapter is on the personnel lifecycle and there’s chapters on many other key aspects of manufacturing operations. They aren’t academic and they’re not descriptive. They’re practical and prescriptive, dealing with how we can be smart in the real world.

Stay tuned for more looks into chapters of the new MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model.

Enhance your exposure by sponsoring the MESA Smart Manufacturing Model.

The Production Asset Lifecycle of the New MESA Smart Manufacturing Model

Authored by John Clemons, MESA Marketing Committee Chair

25 years ago, MESA International created the original MES Model. It’s gone through multiple reincarnations over the years but is still in use in every corner of the world, helping people define MES and MES projects.

Today, MESA International is undertaking one of its largest projects since the original MES Model. MESA International is developing a new Smart Manufacturing Model that will not only be descriptive in explaining what Smart Manufacturing is about, but will be prescriptive by providing specific recommendations on how people can be smart in their manufacturing endeavors.

The new Smart Manufacturing Model will be divided into chapters defining specific lifecycles within the manufacturing environment. One of the chapters will be on the lifecycle of production assets and how individuals can be smart about managing their production assets. Because these chapters are prescriptive, and not merely descriptive, the new Smart Manufacturing Model will be invaluable to Smart Manufacturing practitioners.

The following paragraphs provide an overview of the prescriptive nature of the production asset lifecycle management chapter of the new MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model.

1. Production assets fail unexpectedly. Many failures seem random, but most failures are not random and can be avoided. It’s important to understand what causes unexpected failures and the Smart Manufacturing Model will help us learn how to be smart in avoiding assets that fail unexpectedly.
2. Everyone wants to run their production assets as optimally as possible. But that’s easier said than done and most companies never run their production assets optimally. It’s important to understand what it takes to run production assets in an optimal fashion and the Smart Manufacturing Model will help us learn how we can be smart in making a production asset run optimally.
3. When failures occur it’s important to understand the root cause of the failures. It’s often not what you thought it was. It usually takes a deeper dive into what happened to truly understand the root cause of the failure. It’s important to understand the root causes of failures and the Smart Manufacturing Model will help us understand how to identify the root causes of failures in a smart way.
4. Maintenance is a normal part of the production asset lifecycle but, maintenance that is not synchronized with production just doesn’t add much value. In other words, it’s important to understand how maintenance can drive productivity and remove non-value-added activity. The Smart Manufacturing Model will help us by providing prescriptive actions to achieve this.
5. Likewise, under-maintenance and over-maintenance are also common in the lifecycle of production assets. While everyone wants to minimize under-maintenance and over-maintenance, it can be very difficult to distinguish over, under, and just right. It’s important to understand the causes for under-maintenance and over-maintenance and the Smart Manufacturing Model will help us be smart in avoiding under-maintenance and over-maintenance.
6. Spare parts are an important aspect of the production asset lifecycle. But it can be costly to have spare parts that aren’t needed and even more costly to not have spare parts that are needed. It’s important to understand what spare parts are needed and not needed and the Smart Manufacturing Model will help us to be smart in ordering spare parts.
7. Sometimes production assets might have design flaws that cause rejects during field operation. The Smart Manufacturing Model will prescribe smart actions for leveraging field data for removing design flaws or making design improvements in a production asset.
8. At some point, all production assets must be retired. But it’s costly to retire an asset too early and maybe even more costly to retire an asset too late. It’s important to understand when a production asset should be retired, and the Smart Manufacturing Model will help us to be smart in retiring a production asset at just the right time that will maximize the asset’s economic value.

This is what’s going to be just one chapter of the new MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model. This chapter is on production assets and there are chapters on all other key aspects of the manufacturing operations. The chapters aren’t academic and they’re not merely descriptive. They are practical and prescriptive, dealing with real world situations and how we can be smart in dealing with those situations.

Stay tuned for more looks into chapters of the new MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model.

Enhance your exposure by sponsoring the MESA Smart Manufacturing Model.