Machine monitoring software
Real story: Frequent downtime eliminated, revenue increase Rs. 26,000 pm per machine.
Downtime that accounted for 4% of total time was eliminated in just 1 day, because of Leanworx’s machine monitoring software.
Fixed in 1 day.
Revenue increase: Rs. 26,000 per machine per month, Rs. 2,00,000 per month for all machines.
About the Leanworx user
Hydraulic pumps manufacturer with 57 machines connected to Leanworx machine monitoring system. Machines are CNC VMCs, HMCs. Works 3 shifts of 8 hours each.
Before using Leanworx machine monitoring software
In a bay with 8 HMCs, there was a one hour downtime every day on every machine, for the reason ‘Waiting for tool’. Each machine cost Rs. 1000 per hour, so this was a loss of about Rs. 26,000 per machine per month.
After Leanworx
After the use of Leanworx downtime monitoring software was started, downtime for this particular reason reduced to zero, for all 8 machines. Effectively, eliminating a 1 hour downtime every day means they got a capacity increase of about 4 % with the same capital investment.
How did the transformation happen ?
The downtime monitoring reports in Leanworx showed that there was total downtime of about an hour every for every machine, for ‘waiting for tool’. This appeared in downtime tracking reports and in alerts that supervisors and managers received on their mobile phones.
The manager went over to the shop floor after a couple of days and asked the operators what this downtime was. He found out that the whole bay of 8 machines had one allen key set that was shared between the machines. Allen keys were used in a number of their tool holders. If an operator wanted an allen key, he walked around various machines, found out where it was being used, and then waited till the other person had finished with it. His machine was down all this time.
The manager simply ordered a set of allen keys for every machine the same day, costing Rs. 500 each. So with a one-time investment of Rs. 500, they saved Rs. 26,000 every month on every machine.
You’re probably thinking, “It’s so obvious ! How could they be so stupid and not give allen keys to every machine ?”. Sure, it looks stupid AFTER we hear the story, but every one of us has such stories in our shop floor.
What happened here is that the operators just thought that this WAS the system, and they had worked with it for years. Nobody thought of informing anyone at higher levels of management. People in management did not know that the problem existed, and only came to know of it because they started downtime tracking. Without accurate machine downtime tracking and analysis of downtime reasons, things like this can happen in any shop floor.
All it requires to fix such issues is a machine monitoring software with good machine downtime monitoring, that costs about 1% of the capital investment on new machines.
Downtime reduction features in the machine monitoring software
Continuous and automatic downtime monitoring is a key part of the machine monitoring software. To view, analyze and reduce downtimes you get reports like these:
– Report of late starting and early stoppage of production, at the .start and end of shifts.
– Hourly production report that highlights periods of low or zero production.
– Produced vs planned production quantity.
– Cycle details report showing excess part unload-load times (beyond the standard unload-load time).
– Machine downtime analysis shown as Pareto and pie charts, to help you narrow down on the key causes of downtime and focus on reducing downtime caused by them.
– Machine downtime trends over long time periods – day-wise, week-wise, month-wise, etc., to show you the relationship between your corrective acions and the change in downtime.
– Details of individual machine downtimes – start and end time, duration and reason.
For crisis situations requiring immediate attention, Leanworx sends alerts on mobile phones or email for situations like these:
– Downtime caused by a specfic reason. You can specify the reason.
– Downtime is more than a specific period. Alerts for this go to shop supervisors and managers. You can specify the time period.
– Downtime due to machine breakdown. Sent to maintenance personnel.
Machine downtime is of course one of the key parameters tracked by the machine monitoring software. The downtime duration tracking is fully automatic, with no operator intervention required. The reasons for downtime reasons are recorded automatically if the machine has signals for this, or via operator input devices that are part of the downtime monitoring system.
All these features in the machine monitoring software make downtime reduction easy. For crises situations like machine breakdowns, you can respond to the mobile phone alerts and take immediate action, guided by the maintenance monitoring and ticketing system in Leanworx. For systematic and longer term action on reducing downtime, you can study the machine downtime analysis reports, narrow down on the key downtime reasons and eliminate them. Note that you can see reports and alerts anywhere, anytime, on any device.
Here are some of the reports in Leanworx machine monitoring software that the firm used to achieve the transformation.
Firm and machine names have been changed to protect the identity of the firm.
