Improving Kaizen with Industry 4.0 – Create Solutions

Introduction

In previous articles, I've given an overview of the Kaizen process and how Industry 4.0 solutions can help make it more effective. I've also looked at the first two steps in the process. In today's article, I'll dig more deeply into Step 3.

Step 3: Create Solutions

Step three is to create solutions to the problems that have been identified and prioritized. In the case of the bread manufacturer, step three was obvious. We just adjusted the PM program to inspect and change the pins more frequently. But sometimes it is more complex.

The usual way to go about this is to look at a number of different alternatives. You want to brainstorm and utilize cross-functional teams. Incorporate vendors, partners and customers where beneficial. This may mean getting input from people at remote locations. In 2020, it can help to have augmented reality capabilities to get visibility into the process for those external experts.

Another key capability is being able to track what has been done before and utilize those best practices. Being able to see if this machine has had this same type of failure before, what did we do then? Was it successful? How long did that fix last? Why did it break again? Was there a fix done on a similar piece of equipment that worked better or lasted longer? For maintenance repairs, this information might be in a typical maintenance management system (MMS). However, there has to be a way to capture changes like a process fix, additional training, changes to standard work, etc. That way there can be one central place to look for potential solutions that have been tried in the past.

Another key trap to avoid is, “That’s just the way the line works.”

As an example, I worked with a customer to improve a shampoo bottle filling line. In the data I noticed that there were a lot of short stops attributed to the filler. When we drilled into the data we found that the overhead bottle feeder to the filler was jamming. The current solution to the problem was for the operator to grab a broomstick and poke that until the jammed bottle until the line started feeding again.

When I discussed this with the team, they were a bit defensive about it. They said it only took a few seconds to fix the jam when it happened. They said that the line just worked that way!

So I led them through the data to show the real impact of this problem. That jam was sometimes occurring over 20 times a day. It was true that the operator could clear that jam in a few seconds – they got very skilled with that broomstick! But it was a long line with a single operator. The filler would often be stopped for a few minutes before the operator would see it and get to the jam to clear it.

That silly little jam was actually the single biggest source of downtime for the process.

So we gathered the process engineer, the operator, supervisor and the maintenance team to the line to brainstorm solutions. We put in two key fixes. The first was to fix the alignment of a join in the feed that was causing the bottles to jam. The other was an andon light to let the operator know right away when the filler (the gating process for the line) stopped for any reason. Problem solved!

Another big impact of Industry 4.0 is to broaden the solution space. For many problems in manufacturing, the fix will be some alteration to the physical equipment involved. Going back to the fishbone diagram, these fixes primarily relate to the “Machine” branch. However, when the problem is related to Man, Material, Method, Management or Environmental the fix is often process or system-based.

For these issues, the technologies of Industry 4.0 can provide tremendous benefits.

As a simple example, one of your problems may be that when these machines go down, it’s taking too long for the maintenance department to respond well. In this case, it may be that the maintenance department is stretched thin across a large facility. There are opportunities to put a process in place where the IoT sensors can immediately sense a piece of a equipment has stopped. The fault code from that machine’s controller can be interpreted by an artificial intelligence system to see if maintenance should be involved. Based on those results, a maintenance person can be immediately dispatched for certain types of failures on critical equipment.

Another path may lead to a centralized maintenance contacting the operator to show them what is happening at the machine using augmented reality solutions. Then the maintenance person might be able to diagnose the issue and give instructions to the operator to fix simple issues without having to wait for the maintenance person to get to the machine itself. In this way some percentage of the problems can be resolved with a much shorter response time and the maintenance department does not get stretched as much across the plant.

There are many more solutions possible with some of these technologies than what was available in the past. Broadening the potential solution space is one of the massive benefits that Industry 4.0 provides the Kaizen process.