Implementation of CIMx Paperless Manufacturing

The Existing Situation
A Fortune 500 defense company was awarded a government contract for a complex piece of equipment.  A new production facility was equipped with the machinery and resources necessary to manage the project.  The major challenge for the team was meeting the production, documentation and quality requirements for the project. The contract required a new production process using innovative new machines. Production accuracy was required at better than 1/1000 of an inch across major parts of the product. The goal was Six Sigma quality or greater than 99.9997% production accuracy.

After reviewing alternative solutions, the team determined that the key to successfully completing the project on time and on budget was to implement a paperless shop floor for the highest quality, most efficient production process.  However, the short ramp up time required a rapid implementation of an easy to use software system.

A New Process
The defense company chose CIMx’ Interax paperless manufacturing system.  Interax is a configurable solution that can be rapidly adapted to diverse shop floor operations without requiring the creation of custom software.  The plant manager advised CIMx, “There will be all new people in the plant so, make it simple, show pictures, show how to collect quality data on the shop floor, show how managers can get reports of what is happening and show how a user can email from the shop floor to get engineering help. Make a new manager’s life and a new shop floor person’s life easier.”

The defense company’s requirement for simplicity and a rapid implementation was met with a 1 day installation, 5 day training session, 30 day complete locally configured setup, and production use in less than 90 days. 

How It Works
All detailed information needed to perform production work on the shop floor is delivered to a browser at each workstation.  Large flat screen monitors display the work status, drawings and other information needed by shop floor personnel.  As work is performed all procedures are monitored and validated for completeness, accuracy and proper sequencing through procedural enforcement.  All quality checks, work buy-offs, and other data are collected at the point of origin resulting in complete accurate flow of production data into a database.  Managers are able to see at any instant from their desks what is happening across production and make real time decisions to maintain operational efficiency.

The Result
The company is realizing its vision of a paperless shop floor that is highly efficient, has increased quality and automatically creates accurate and complete records of all production activities.  Interax was able to create a seamless flow of information across the shop floor and deliver production data from the shop floor to a central control point. The large defense company was able to :  

• Increase product quality to Six Sigma or fewer than 3.4 defects per 1 million operations.

• Reduce walk around and wait time on the shop floor
• Increase shop floor productivity by 50%
• Display all information needed at a work center all the time
• Store a single “as-built record” including all measures and data collected
• Keep An accurate record of who did what, when for billing
• Realize cost savings across the entire shop floor within 12 months of implementation