Put electronic production management on your radar

When former Racal Defence Electronics, now Thales Sensors in Leicester, got the contract to manufacture digital radar array (DRA) antenna components and cables for the Euro ART (advanced radar technology) consortium’s Cobra high speed digital radar array defence vehicle, the firm had a serious challenge on its hands. Thales’ Leicester site had been geared to small scale batch production – but this was a five year build programme for 29 vehicles, each requiring 750 transmitter/receiver unit (TR) assemblies and the same number of cables – meaning 125 of each item per week. The old ways wouldn’t work. “We were old fashioned batch manufacture – building from kits in relatively low volume,” explains Simon Bone, principal manufacturing systems analyst. And that meant many months worth of work in progress (WIP) on the shopfloor and the usual mix of manual and machine work with paper works orders, in its case a route card pack bearing the item list, engineering instructions, change notes, etc, and a build record requiring written data entry and sign off etc. It was classic manual-intensive stuff. Bone says it wasn’t up to the new game, and adds that it was very much in Thales’ interests to implement new, slicker, lower cost, more efficient manufacturing methods: it had to minimise cycle times and cut out waste while maintaining its defence quality and traceability standards. And there was three further requirements: for the contract, Thales had to download all build and test data onto field diagnostics chips for each assembly; it had to keep build histories on every item for 10 years; and its R&D in Crawley needed to ‘see’ build and test parameters for on-going process development. Everything pointed to moving away from paper, to electronic production data capture. But with thoughts turned to digital, Bone says his project team decided it wanted more than shopfloor data capture. Having visited DTI reference sites and been to PERA and some of its own suppliers, it decided it needed “an MES” [manufacturing execution system]. Others would call it a production management system. Either way, “We knew we had to get away from paper drawings in production; we wanted engineers to be able to view documents on screen – CAD drawings, items, jobs and procedures – all on flat panel displays,” he says. “We didn’t want keyboards, just menu-driven touch screens.” Mike Wynn, manufacturing project manager, says this would support the multi-stage cell manufacturing, with repetitive flow production and multi-role manual assembly. Materials would be on the line, with consumption and replenishment via a two-tier Kanban system that maintained components’ batch traceability and ensured that jobs were done according to assignable real time priority – and that best/fastest practice could be captured, exposed and spread. So early in 1999, Thales went looking – in the pages of this journal and at the Computers in Manufacturing Show – and found Mestec’s system. Bone: “We also looked at systems from Infa Communications, Dataware and Crown Computing, but we chose Mestec’s Manufacturing Process Management (MPM) because of the cost, the fact that it offered all the required functionality, including displaying drawings and manufacturing instructions, it was non-customised and because it was about managing people and processes, not machines.” And the result has been a roaring success. Thales implemented Mestec’s MPM electronic production management system first on its cables production line. Bone: “We had to deliver cables before TRs and cables were simpler – there were no serialised items and components to worry about. So we started building cables on Version One of MPM in 1999.” Then in October last year, Thales went live with MPM v2.0 (rewritten, scaleable, faster, running on Windows 2000 Terminal Server and with the promise of better configuration, visualisation and event management tools) on its new TR assemblies line. Manufacturing is now paperless. Operators at any cell workstation use a barcode scanner to identify themselves, and get their next job from their touch screen. The system generates a job barcode label and then provides access to whatever they need in terms of 3D drawings, item numbers and pictures, procedure flowcharts and so forth, with on-line help, all via the touch screen. Everything they see is configurable through MPM’s configuration manager, and in terms of set-up Thales says it’s been very simple: production engineering, for example, provided the electronic drawings direct from CAD data, simply adding commentary and saving as HTML pages to the MPM server. But it’s done a lot more. MPM has also given management visibility over manufacturing operations and has led directly to process improvement, cycle time and manufacturing cost reduction, and problem and defect resolution – all in very short time frames. It’s allowed Thales to identify bottlenecks, operator difficulties and so forth all on screen via real time reports and alerts. “It’s good for us as a management system. It shows we’re in control,” says Wynn. “We get performance data immediately, not in a month’s time. We can see how many items were produced in a particular day, individual performance reports, actual construction times, who’s doing what versus the estimated times. It’s all there straight away.” And that, he says, has been the catalyst to sustained process improvement, through operator retraining, the spread best practice, bottleneck busting and the rest. Philip Hall, chief quality engineer, gives the example of dealing with managers’ and operators’ learning curves in production. “It’s helped us analyse the build sequence – build rates change with the learning curve and create their own bottlenecks. But we can see that with MPM and manage it,” he says. And on the way it’s also helped to reduce work-in-process (WIP), improved scheduling and capacity planning and augmented supplier replenishment procedures: build items don’t get lost in the ‘manufacturing black hole of MRP’ since MPM provides on-line visibility of all shopfloor stock. Beyond production, Thales is using MPM in despatch. Boxes are barcoded and have to be matched to their assembly: the system won’t allow packaging to proceed without the right swipe. Says Hall: “So if a package goes missing or it’s damaged we know what’s in it. It’s an additional validation.” And it’s installed at Thales’ Crawley R&D site where the TR modules are currently shipped for testing. MPM tracks the assemblies through both sites and again provides full real time visibility. As for hard benefits, Thales says it expects tangible savings of £440,000 over the five-year period, making ROI (return on investment) just 14 months. By far the majority of this comes from reduced cycle times (worth an estimated £325,000), followed by the elimination of costs associated with manual data entry (£90,100) and also reduced defects (£11,000). Wynn adds: “You have to think about the cost of not having it – the cost of paper-based shopfloor management, the paper itself, the time spent writing… Then there’s employing people to find records if there are recalls; the errors.” He makes the point that whereas manufacturing isn’t traditionally measured on some of this – costs are hidden in support staff and budgeted for separately – you need to think bigger picture to get total costs. And he says that with 6,000 assemblies now built, all the trends are in the right direction. “We have already achieved an 18% reduction in cycle time and we’re continuously monitoring the process in search of further reductions… It’s the speed of getting the data that makes all the difference.” All say the system could be used elsewhere to great effect – and indeed at Thales Missile Electronics in Basingstoke, for one, is signed up, while Celestica has also got Mestec on its radar. PCs and touch screens on the shopfloor won’t be a problem, and with Terminal Server you don’t need the PCs anyway – and there’s the option of Citrix for remote application serving. With costs for a typical 30-user system at £110,000 including implementation and training, Wynn’s advice is: “Ignore what you’ve got and think about what you need to do the job.”