The importance of the Industry 4.0-enabled job shop

To economic pundits, Industry 4.0 is easy to understand. The increased presence of automation and the ease of digital information exchange between hardware and software systems has launched a new era of manufacturing, one that promises to achieve new levels of efficiency that would make the head of a 1960 assembly line worker spin.

This “connectivity” holds great promise for job shops as well, but metal fabricators need some convincing. As a community, fabricators make incredibly complex things out of heavy raw materials. By comparison, software seems nonexistent. This causes a bit of skepticism and a reluctance to adopt software-based systems and digitalization.

In this new industrial age, the truly connected shop has quick and reliable access to digital information. They are digitalized. They have much-needed information when they need it.

When lean manufacturing exercises are conducted and metal fabricators learn their employees spend hours per shift just looking for tools, they are horrified. What if the same thinking were applied to employees looking for information? Various statistical studies estimate the average employee spends between 1.5 and 2.5 hours per day searching for information.1 U.S. industry has practiced lean manufacturing for several decades, and just about every shop has some semblance of a 5S practice (i.e., “a place for everything and everything in its place”). When it comes to nontangible digital information, manufacturers do not have the same commitment.

The Industry 4.0 shop has a place for all its information, and all that information is in place and available for use. Everything is entered only once; there is no need for redundant inputting of information.

To get a more complete picture of what connectivity means for a modern metal fabricator, let’s take a closer look at key shop processes and consider how they can be improved.

Elevating Quoting Activities

Quoting is one of the most critical aspects for any business, especially for fabricators. Raw material costs are constantly changing. Supplier costs can vary significantly. The slightest change in work load or capacity can increase labor costs dramatically. Take too long to issue a quote, and you lose the opportunity; rush to make the quote, and you risk losing money. Speed and accuracy are required for quoting, and both are nearly impossible without being digital.

To quote accurately, you need to understand your costs entirely. To quote quickly as well, you must have immediate access to your costs; visibility of your risks; and rules that cover variations, such as weight and distance. To quote both accurately and quickly at the same time, you need all of that in an enterprisewide system that collects data in real time, for every part, purchase, work center, and process.

This is not the same as, for example, putting all your costs in a spreadsheet then entering variables, like part dimensions, to calculate a price. In that scenario, a company that updated the cost of 304 2B stainless sheets in June 2018 would have lost an average of 10 percent on every quote made since.

In the optimized digital job shop, information is extracted from a job order, which minimizes manual input of information and avoids potential redundancy found in conventional paper-based order processing. The goal of digitalization is the complete elimination of non-value-added rework. Ideally, any information entered into the shop management software system should never be retyped by anyone at the company again.

Imagine a shop that produces simple cut parts all day in varying quantities. When an order is won, if it takes one minute to locate the quote and then two minutes to copy the data to the order, three minutes is wasted searching and retyping. Three minutes may sound insignificant, but if the company processes just 10 orders per day, more than three weeks of time is spent annually on this simple task.

Sharing Information More Intelligently

Typically, once the job order has been accepted in the front office, the data contained in the order is then re-entered into other disconnected systems, such as a CAD/CAM nesting system. Getting the required order data into these systems typically takes more time as the part geometry must be located and matched to the order. Then order data such as reference numbers, quantities, materials, and machinery must be determined and added manually. Conservatively this process could take 10 minutes per part in an order. Assuming the same example of 10 orders per day, one part per order, a company could spend nearly 11 weeks per year entering data from the order system into the CAD/CAM nesting system, which is just one of probably several downstream processes that require order data.

Having an integrated digital system that detects the required part geometry and associates the quote data to the order and CAD/CAM nesting systems could save, in this very basic example, 13 weeks of time. That equates to 25 percent of the year.

Improving Purchasing

A connected system prevents every department that handles a purchase from having to re-enter existing information. It is in the shared visibility of items that a digitally connected shop saves the most.

Consider raw material inventory. Accurate, real-time inventory status, which is digitally connected to order processing, production, and purchasing, connects the purchaser to the shop floor, without the need for paperwork. As soon as a sales order is released, the system can identify what, if any, items are already in inventory, what items need to be converted from raw materials, and whether those raw materials exist in inventory. Once a purchase order is issued, the connected system can make the pending receipt visible to the shipping department. Once the receipt is received, the purchaser and department waiting for the items immediately can see the order was fulfilled.

Streamlining Invoice Generation

Generating invoices without a digital enterprise system introduces substantial risk and wastes time. Companies lose money every day that an invoice is not in the hands of a customer. It is often difficult for accounting departments to know what can be invoiced in a timely manner as terms often are complicated and may depend on completed work or delivery of a product. Confirmation for the accounting department that an item has been delivered usually depends on paperwork that is easily lost. This causes accounting staff to search order lines for work that is not invoiced and then search for the physical part in production, department by department, until they are able to determine the status. Then there are scenarios where labor or outsourcing must be included.

The accounting office faces similar problems because of lack of connectivity or visibility with purchased items. When an invoice arrives that cannot be matched to a packing slip or paperwork, someone must search the factory until they find the item that was received. Given that most sheets of steel look identical, a shop floor employee can find this task nearly impossible.

When using an integrated system, the accounting department automatically receives digital notifications from the shipping and receiving department when parts are delivered to customers. They have visibility of production orders and their status and can instantly see things such as unshipped order lines. As the system is integrated, employees do not have to re-enter data, which significantly reduces the potential for error.

Leveraging the CAD Model

Connectivity to the CAD model of a part has an incredible impact. It saves time; reduces error; and in the best of cases can be used to determine production time, inventory location, and purchasing requirements.

The amount of time spent re-entering data such as the part numbers or quantities pales in comparison to redrawing a customer’s CAD geometry. It is typical to receive PDF drawings from customers. Unless you have a system that can import them as CAD, they must be redrawn, adding at least an hour of time in the simplest case. Companies that make their own products and have models in a CAD system typically must open each part and export a neutral file, such as a DXF file, so that the CAD model can be used for nesting or bending. Even when a DXF file is provided by the customer, it could contain data exchange errors. Cleaning up those errors could cause unintended changes to the CAD model definition, which could cause scrapped parts. Finally, storing DXF files in computer directories means searching for them in the directories, which wastes more time.

While using the CAD model to eliminate rework saves time, truly integrated systems can bring even greater levels of savings and data reuse. The geometry of a CAD model can be referenced for things such as weight, number of bends required, material, and size, which all help to make quoting more accurate. The need to estimate and then to enter data, such as cut time or weight, is estimated, and costs such as shipping can be determined with certainty.

Easing the Expediting Ritual

Humans are a permanent part of manufacturing, even when an entire process can be automated. Try to teach a robot to reasonably handle a “hot part.” As cool as artificial intelligence, as demonstrated by Google and Alexa, might be, fabricators are not ready for it to decide what customers will have their jobs expedited through the shop and what jobs will have to wait. Human beings add value that a fully automated and even robot-driven process cannot. Simply put, humans can think.

Having said that, fabricators must use automation to their advantage and eliminate nonvalue work. Humans are then able to think about solutions and innovations, with emotion, so that they will get the best results.

The very instant a schedule is created it is out of date because people get sick, machines break down, and suppliers miss delivery dates. Real-time visibility, analytics, and a flexible system that allows shops to run “what-if” scenarios make it possible for fabricators to monitor what is happening in real life, make informed decisions on-the-fly, and meet the most possible or most beneficial goal. With such a system, you should be able to weigh the impact of change in a simulated manner and then execute the best choice.

A fabricator could, for example, add six hours of overtime, see the increased cost versus potential penalty, and adjust its plan for the best possible outcome. When a part is scrapped because it was bent backwards, the fabricator could see its due date, the impact missing that date will have, find other parts made of the same material, decide to add it to an appropriate nest, push it in front of other press brake work, and win the day!

Improving Production Management

A connected system always presents real-time information versus commitments along with the flexibility and control to solve the confounding production dilemma. The system should operate like a horse whip for work-in-process, signaling the moment there is risk of a missed deadline. The system should know all the required routing steps of a production order and the capacity for each of those steps, in real time, such that it can indicate potential risk for missed deadlines. Any required materials, if not in inventory, should be evident and associated with an expected receipt date. When a hazard arises, such as a cutting machine being down for unexpected service, an alternative should be evident and simple to utilize. The system should display bottlenecks clearly and allow the human planner to make changes to production, without meetings, emails, or chaos, for the best result.

Connectivity also has the potential to make the sharing of information with customers easier. They can log into the system and see just where their orders are.

Some Final Advice

Bob Dylan’s first Top 40 hit was “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” released in January 1965. (The acoustic bootleg of the song is really great, if you can find it.) In the song he sings, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” That lyric applies to you, the fabricator, because you know better than anyone else what you need to successfully implement a digital transformation.

Take the time to walk through your processes, taking note of anywhere you are duplicating effort, re-entering data, or spending considerable time detailing information that cannot be used in other places. If you have a kanban shelf or a production board that is useful only when you are directly in front of it, for example, write that down. Know which way the wind is blowing.

Consult your most valuable resource—your team. Ask what they are afraid to change and what wastes their time. Use these notes to evaluate the systems you have in place, as well as systems you might put in place.

Also, don’t buy any system that will not integrate with other systems and does not store data in a manner that can be shared easily.

A metal fabricating operation is always home to a lot of activity. True connectivity can help fabricators stay on top of it with confidence that they likely never had before.

Adria Haines is director, Lantek Sheet Metal Solutions, 5412 Courseview Drive, Suite 205, Mason, OH 45040, 877-805-1028, info.usa@lanteksms.com, www.lanteksms.com.

Note¹: www.bwd-it.com/various-survey-statistics-workers-spend-too-much-time-searching-for-information