20/09/2019 for Ultatek Situation A Mexican automotive plant with an assembly line, featuring maintenance, quality, supply, and production areas, constantly requires assistance from each of its departments 24 hours a day. Consequently, whenever support is needed in any of those departments, on-site personnel with the necessary qualifications are sought via radio communication, but their intervention and attention are not being received in a timely manner. In this regard, this automotive plant is experiencing production line stoppages due to the lack of immediate attention from different departments to the production line. Problems and Needs Normally, when support from area staff is needed on a production line, the time that elapses becomes a determining factor. The longer it takes, the less productive the plant becomes. When staff support arrives with inadequate time for the production line, unscheduled line stoppages begin to occur, which, of course, completely affect productivity, especially because there is no way to measure calls to each of the departments and seek to improve response times. Reasons The production line manager seeks to measure unscheduled downtime for each of the areas responsible for it. The objective is to process the information and be able to perform real-time analysis of calls to the production line stations. This is possible with the implementation of a system capable of displaying and processing information to keep real-time statistics of distress calls from workstations across the entire assembly line. Technical capabilities Develop a SCADA system with which the automotive plant manager can monitor the status of calls, as well as process the information to keep real-time statistics of the calls made by the operator to: Material Handling Quality Increase Line Efficiency Taking Action to Reduce Unplanned Downtime Production and Maintenance in Production Lines Solution ULTATEK has integrated an Andon system into an automotive plant using lamps and a control panel at each production line station. Each button is labeled for its respective area: production, maintenance, quality, and material supply. The operation is simple. You should press the button, according to the department, when support from that area is needed, and the lamp turns on depending on the requested support. The calls are scalable, so the first phase is for the call to be visual and after a certain time, it sends an email to the area manager, up to the area's general manager. This Andon system in an automotive plant is capable of recording each call, from the request for support to the handling of the call by the corresponding personnel. Real-time monitoring allows for decisions to be made to reduce downtime. Each user registers in the Andon system for the automotive plant when starting operations, to conduct analysis by shift and by operator for each station. With the registered information, reports and statistics of calls are generated for each of the stations and for each of the departments. Result By implementing and using this Andon system at an automotive plant, the company was able to reduce the number of stoppage calls by up to 65%. This is because, using the information from statistical reports, they have been able to address the most frequent problems. Calls per shift decreased considerably after one year of system implementation, as did line downtime, resulting in reduced expenses.
