The Visual Factory in 2022
Introduction
The term “visual factory” refers to influencing behavior in the plant by providing visual information and cues throughout the workplace. The visual factory uses a system of communication tools to share information at the time and place it is needed. The goal for today is this: How can we improve visual controls using smart factory solutions to create the desired behaviors throughout the plant? Achieving that goal will require a change to how things are done in traditional manufacturing or even in lean manufacturing environments.
To get started, we'll look at a few types of visual controls to narrow down our focus for the discussion. Next will be a comparison of the benefits (and drawbacks) of manual controls and digital controls. The article will finish up with some examples of visual factory in traditional systems and also enhanced with augmented reality capabilities.
Types of Controls for the Visual Factory
Basic Visual Controls
At a basic level, visual controls are meant to inform people of the status of an operation, or to provide directions or instructions on unexpected behaviors. These goals can be achieved with simple controls. Examples are static signs such as stop signs in walkways or shadow boards that display where to put different tools. Even labels on bins are part of a visual factory so that everybody understands exactly where things are supposed to be. This type of control isn't the focus for today, and these can go on exactly as they are. These controls are perfectly effective as they are and don’t need capabilities from smart factory solutions.
Process-Oriented Visual Controls
The type of control we will be focusing on today are process-oriented visual controls. As stated in David Mann's book "Creating a Lean Culture", the purpose for visual controls in lean management is to focus on the process and make it easy to compare expected versus actual performance. Another way to put it is to provide the “nervous system” for lean management.
There are many examples of these types of controls, but I have a few listed here:
Each of these boards serves a different purpose. Some of those are meant to track whether the teams are winning or losing on a given day, or how they are performing versus the plan. Some of them are meant for basic tracking. Others are used for planning purposes. But they can all play an important role in the factory.
For a lot of companies these controls are maintained in a very manual fashion, displayed on boards with people either coloring in the sheets themselves or printing these off from Excel on a daily or weekly basis and posting them up.
They are great because they are color-coded you can immediately see if the status is green or red for any metric. And that's excellent! It is very visual. It is very easy to see where the problems are. But there are some issues with these boards and how they are maintained.
Manufacturing has Embraced Technology and Automation
One quick note is that manufacturing has embraced technology over the past several decades. In fact, manufacturing has always embraced technology and automation. However, operational excellence teams have been resistant to automation and continue to use whiteboards, paper tick sheets and printed Excel spreadsheets.
Over the past 10 to 20 years manufacturing processes have been enhanced by the extensive use of robots, lasers, and even augmented reality. Many of those things seemed futuristic when I started out in manufacturing in the early 90’s. It is amazing to see all the advanced technology embedded into the manufacturing processes across industries.
But when I walk manufacturing floors, I still see whiteboards being used to manually track information. Here is a snapshot of that “lean” process:
That same data is being re-recorded five separate times! And this is the process that the “lean” department is dictating! Even where the process isn’t this bad, there are many examples of operational excellence teams not taking advantage of the information available.
Additional Problems with Manual Controls
There are additional issues with these manual controls on the shop floor.
Using a more modern approach, these controls can be maintained in a much more automated fashion with a lot less waste in the process. In the inset photo, I would argue that we are seeing a living example there of the eighth waste of the underutilization of human potential. I’m sure he could be doing something more valuable with his time than putting printed sheets into a magnetic holder every single day.
That waste is one key problem with manual controls. There is a lot of waste – including excess movement, rework, and human potential. The gentleman could be solving problems in the plant, but instead he is printing out forms, carrying them over to the board, then swapping out an old sheet with the new one inside of the plastic holder there.
Another issue that is extremely common is errors. Missing data can be a huge issue, as can transcription errors when someone is transferring information from the boards to excel. As an example, I had a customer that was using a pace board to track production and downtime. Then they captured that downtime from the pace board into an access database at the end of every shift. As a pilot, we connected an I-IoT (Industrial Internet of Things) system to some of the equipment in the plant to automatically capture downtime events. We found that the customer was capturing less than 10% of the downtime events with their manual process!
Most of the stops on the equipment were short stops – but they added up over time. The current approach was capturing less than 20% of the total downtime, as well. Everyone meant well, but when the machine only stopped for 60 or 90 seconds for a jam, nobody bothered to write that kind of event down. So – when they went to improve the performance through Kaizen events, they were using information that was woefully incomplete. They didn’t even know what the big problems were, let alone the key root causes of performance.
That highlights another problem – keeping up with a fast-paced environment. When it comes to capturing minor stops, high paced production counts, or any other rapidly changing information, manual methods just can’t keep up. That’s one way to end up with less than 10% of events being captured.
Then there are additional limitations. Information captured on a white board is only viewable from right in front of that whiteboard. Sharing information with other groups such as engineering, maintenance, purchasing, quality or others is impossible unless they are standing right there. To save or persist the data, it has to be entered into a system anyway. I’ve worked with customers that had major product recalls that had big gaps in their available information about what happened on the shop floor when those parts were produced because the information went onto a white board but got erased at the end of that shift. Finally, there is only so much detail that fits on a white board. A system can capture so much more context of what was happening at a machine or a process that just isn’t otherwise possible.
Why Stick with Manual Visual Controls?
Despite all these issues with manual controls, many (or most) lean practitioners still strongly believe that the information should be maintained manually on white boards on the shop floor. I believe their thinking is well captured by the book “Creating a Lean Culture” by David Mann.
As a quick aside, the book is a fantastic reference on lean implementations and is one my favorite books on how to implement lean. It is also the winner of a Shingo price for lean manufacturing books.
The following graphic is pulled from his chapter on visual controls and provides a very good summary of traditional thinking on manual controls versus what he calls “IT Provided”.
Using this list at this time is a little bit unfair to David Mann because that book came out in the early 2000’s. I believe what he was talking about at the time were ERP systems (such as SAP and Oracle) and being able to generate reports from there to display on the shop floor. I would agree with him there. Those systems were terrible for this purpose at that time.
However, the list is still very representative of the conversations I have recently had with lean or operational excellence practitioners in many companies. The strong belief is that “you need to have manual boards to keep people's fingerprints on the process.” The argument is that if you automate the data collection, you lose the sense of ownership and that feeling of involvement of the people. The additional key argument I have heard is that you get much better understanding from people when they are updating things manually.
Hurdles to Going Digital
What we're going to do for a little bit here is go through and look at essentially each one of those complaints from David Mann and talk about how we can address those with Industry 4.0 technologies.
Information Timely?
Industry 4.0:
We recommend using systems such as an Industrial Internet of Things (I-IoT) platform to capture data directly from the process. With systems like this, the information is captured in real-time, directly from the machines. It can be displayed in near real-time anywhere in the world.
Traditional Approach:
When this is done manually on the floor, the information is usually current as of the last time someone walked over to the board to update it. For something like an SQDCIM board, this can be hard to determine for any piece of information. For a pace board, this will only be accurate as of the most recent pitch / time bucket. This assumes that the operator has time to leave his station to update the board.
Information Accessible?
Industry 4.0:
Today, we can put that information up on those big screen TVs you see there in the background, and it can be seen from much further away than a white board or any manual control. Additionally, the information can be simultaneously updated on that board, plus phones, tablets, computers and other displays throughout the plant, company, and world. Furthermore, it can be passed to other systems to keep them updated with the most recent information, as well.
Traditional Approach:
That traditional view was that the board is right there for “everyone” to see. However, it is only accessible from within 10-15 feet of the white board. The information is not available to anyone outside of that space immediately in front of the board.
Information Precise?
Industry 4.0:
In the past it was viewed as a negative that the information displayed in systems was going to give a false sense of reliability. Because of the precision with which the information was presented by systems, it leads people to believe that data even if the source was not carefully controlled. What we can do today is make sure that the information coming from the machine controllers and sensors is not only precise, but also highly accurate.
Traditional Approach:
Even staunch defenders of the manual approach recognize that the information displayed on the boards often lacks precision. The counts are rarely done at a granular level – they are almost always performed on high-level information and generally lack any degree of context to the information.
Information Verifiably Accurate?
Industry 4.0:
Because we can periodically verify the accuracy of the data from these systems, we should have confidence that the information being displayed at any given time is accurate, as well. Also, because the system is hooked up directly to the machines, the counts being reported can be validated against the machine counts, the counts being reported at the end of the process, or any other validation point. Any discrepancies can be immediately identified and investigated.
Traditional Approach:
Accuracy can be a bigger challenge than precision! The operators might get busy, they may count or add wrong, or they might transcribe something incorrectly. As explained earlier, some of the data captured manually can be *extremely* inaccurate. When capturing downtime through a manual process, companies rarely get visibility to short stops, line slowdowns or other issues. Verifying the information can also be a big challenge that requires a lot of manual effort.
Does it Prompt Questions?
Industry 4.0:
Another question here is: “does the data prompt questions?” Smart Factory displays can provide data in an infinite number of configurations. In addition, it can be provided with a great deal of context – who was working a machine, what products were being produced, when downtime occurred, supplier information, quality data, process variable information, statistical process control charts, and much more. The data can be made interactive so that when questions arise, the underlying information can be viewed within the same view. Additionally, these displays can be connected to workflows that allow for complex analysis and multi-person problem solving.
Traditional View:
All of this interactivity and context is simply not possible with manual boards in the plant. There is not room for the same amount of information. People don’t have the ability to capture the data at that same level of granularity to allow drill-downs. There is simply nothing that can be presented on a white board that cannot be presented on a connected display. On the other hand, smart factory displays can show far more information.
Is it Easy to Change and Customize?
Industry 4.0:
It is easy to understand why this would be perceived as an advantage for white boards. ERP reporting and MES reporting have historically been very difficult for end users to modify in any meaningful way. Even a minor change usually required a change request to IT that could take anywhere from a few weeks to many months to complete.
That is not the case with today’s systems. There are many options for displaying information on the shop floor that make it easy for manufacturing to maintain and change the visual controls in any way they desire. It is often no more difficult than using Microsoft Excel. Even a complex-looking SQDCIM application like the one above is built in a user-focused reporting tool that can be easily changed when new columns are desired (or old columns aren’t!)
For changes that require information not being currently collected, agile methodologies will let you roll out a minimal viable product within a very short period of time and go through cycles of improvement on those that allow you to really quickly adapt to changing needs in the plant.
Traditional View:
Changing the information going on to a white board is simple! Even if the board is heavily customized with tape, permanent ink, or other markings…white boards are cheap. A new one can be purchased and customized as desired.
Intimidation Factor?
Industry 4.0:
Another common complaint about these systems is that people in manufacturing are “intimidated” by these systems.
First off, I think this vastly underestimates most people in manufacturing. This may have been a valid objection back in the early 2000’s, but I think it was overstated even back then. These days almost everyone has some degree of computer literacy and is used to looking at screens on their phones at the very least.
I think this was also based on the way system reports looked back in the early 2000’s and earlier. They were typically very information dense, table-based reports coming from ERP systems. That is far from the case for many of today’s systems. Later in the article I will be giving examples of how these displays can look and be much easier to understand than most white boards!
Traditional View:
Users will not understand the information presented on a computer screen and will better relate to simple information on a white board.
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Again – this is hogwash. The computer screen can be designed in the *exact* same format as the whiteboard. Why would it be more intimidating?
In addition to the display of the information, these traditional systems required people to manually update the information on the board. This often requires the people on the floor to do math to update the boards – that’s a bigger intimidation factor than reading information from a TV screen.
Ownership or Alienation?
Industry 4.0:
Another question raised by the book is whether the visual control leads to ownership or alienation. This is a valid concern – using automated or manual processes. When the data is collected automatically, companies must find another way to get the people involved and take ownership of the information.
Traditionally, the view is that having people maintain the information will connect them to the process and lead to ownership of the information. The question, though, is whether they are taking ownership of process improvement or just collecting the data. If they are just taking ownership of recording the information, that is of limited value to the company.
By automating the non-value-add portion of simply recording the data, it opens the opportunity for the company to build standard work around using the data to improve the process. With no additional time commitment, the company can have the operator track the information being reported by the system and get them involved in participating in the daily, incremental improvements that are at the heart of true continuous improvement.
This is a far more beneficial type of ownership for the company to work to instill in the workforce.
Traditional View:
The easiest way to get people involved – and to verify that they are participating – is to have them physically record the information. If there’s a blank spot on the board, it is easy for management to see that and know who is not following the process.
There is a time and place for the manual approach, though. When first implementing lean practices and trying to get people to understand the concepts, it can be very helpful to have them participate in the basics such as manually maintaining visual controls. However, once that phase has been passed, it is time to automate and eliminate waste.
Information Simultaneously Available In Many Places?
Industry 4.0
This is a question where even David Mann credited a system approach has an advantage. Once the data is in a system, it can be displayed on an unlimited number of places at one time. The data can be displayed on big screen TV’s throughout the plant, as well as on a screen local to each work center. The displays can be tailored to the needs of the user at each location. The plant manager can have a live display in his office with data from across the plant updating in real time. Gemba walks can be made much more effective by providing detailed information about the performance of each station during the walk.
Traditional View:
You can see it from anywhere within 10-15 feet of the white board. The only way the information is available anywhere else is if rework is performed and someone else enters it into a system afterwards.
Computational Accuracy?
Industry 4.0:
100% of the time.
The source data can be inaccurate, but the computations are going to be correct. Basic math is never going to be a problem for any of these systems. If there is a coding error, that error will be caught and corrected during the initial commissioning of the system.
Traditional View:
David Mann put it best, “With humans, no computation should be considered routine.” Well said!
Whether it is the operators on the floor or even highly trained engineers, mistakes will happen whenever you ask humans to do the math manually. Put simply, any data in these displays that requires counting, adding, multiplying, or any other operation has to be taken with a grain of salt until the math is verified.
Overhead Required?
Industry 4.0
Yes – there is significant overhead required. There have to be controllers on the machines or sensors to gather the data at the edge. Networking has to be in place to allow for smart factory solutions to talk to the devices. The smart factory solutions themselves must be purchased, installed, and configured on a server at the factory or in the cloud. All that hardware and software must be maintained over time.
Traditional View:
The white board needs to be replaced once in a while. That’s pretty much it for the hard costs. However, there is also the ongoing cost to cover the wastes in this process documented previously. If the machine is down while the operator walks away from their station to update the board, that downtime can easily make up the difference in overhead.
However, given the advantages discussed above, the better return on investment is a different question. There is a lot of value to the smart factory solutions and building standard work around them to drive continuous improvement practices within the operation.
Examples
This section will highlight a few examples from various companies. At Visual Decisions, we have worked with many companies that provide smart factory software.
KPI Dashboard
In this example, the primary screen is a KPI dashboard like an SQDCIME view across different metrics displayed in a highly graphical format. These displays have easy to understand views that are updated in real-time.
One key to highlight is the ability to drill down into the data even from the high-level KPI display. One of the challenges addressed earlier was the ability to prompt and answer multiple questions from the visual control. With displays like this, they can prompt many different questions. Furthermore, they can be answered by drilling into the data and looking at additional levels of information. It is obviously impossible to create that kind of interactivity on a whiteboard! This can help drive a much deeper level of understanding for your people.
OEE Overview
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a very common and important metric in manufacturing these days. These displays can show the OEE across many machines at one time. More than that, though, they can show how that OEE is derived from the detailed shop floor data.
This is important for several reasons.
First, it can raise the knowledge level of the people in the manufacturing operation. By not only seeing how OEE is calculated from its components, but also seeing a graphical representation of a timeline for the asset it creates a deeper understanding of what OEE represents.
Second, this can be extremely helpful for problem solving. For example, when OEE is being dragged down by availability issues caused by short stops, the fix is usually some form of error proofing to prevent jams or similar issues. When the availability losses are being driven by major stoppages, then the fix for the issue is often of a more preventive maintenance nature.
In addition to the length of failure, the reasons for failures are also displayed here. In fact, there can easily be a drill-down that shows the reasons for the downtime in much greater detail. That also enables rapid problem-solving and can prompt the people to take action to address the problems.
Finally, this type of view also helps create ownership of the process with the employee. Many times, the reason for downtime cannot be pulled from the machine itself and the operator needs to select that reason. By providing visual feedback in this visual control on the floor, the operator understands the reason why the accuracy of those reasons is important.
Connected Work Cell
Visual Controls at the individual workstation can also be useful for improving operations. For example, these displays can be used for delivering work instructions to the operator to assist with adherence to standard work. A positive feedback process can be created by detecting any deviations from the standard work and immediately highlighting those to the worker.
The data feeding these systems can also be connected to the machine and even the tooling being used at the workstation to automatically capture results and display them to the operator in real-time. This can greatly facilitate process quality when someone other than the primary operator is working at that task. They can see the results of their work and adjust as necessary to stay within standards. Soon they are able to run the process like an established veteran.
Augmented Reality and the Visual Factory
The next thing coming to the Visual Factory is Augmented Reality (AR). This section will cover some of the ways AR technology can be used to make the factory more visual than ever. ?
Seeing Better
AR allows workers to see things about the plant they can’t see with the naked eye. Think about a Gemba walk where all the information about the plant performance is highlighted for every machine or workstation as you walk past. Where you can see details of downtime, quality issues, or other performance metrics and interact with the information in new and intuitive ways.
AR Solutions for Visual Factory
Here are some examples of different solutions that can be put in place using augmented reality capabilities:
The ultimate way to inform employees of relevant standard work and to provide work instructions is with AR solutions. Rather than having these topics sit in printed binders, they are right in front of the worker and sensitive to the context in the field of view. They can provide three dimensional instructions for complex equipment setup. They can guide the worker through maintenance tasks. They can allow the worker to have his hands free, performing the task, while still providing work instructions to help them do the task efficiently, with high quality and safely.
Sometimes there are additional things that you can do with these kinds of augmented controls that you can't do with a physical control panel. For example, being able to overlay alerts and notifications of how the machine is performing, you have those capabilities with the glasses that you just don't have with a flat screen or traditional displays. As an example, the glasses can actually highlight a component of the machine that is showing excess wear and provide instructions on the recommended actions to address the issue.
From a quality perspective, AR can assist with the inspection process. In the above example, the inspectors utilize the glasses to be able to see how things are supposed to look and then how they look in real life. The glasses will highlight any discrepancies between the two. They can see whether the engine is assembled correctly or whether there are any missing parts. They can go through their individual steps very interactively to be able to see and check everything in the list, snap photos along the way, connect to the testing equipment and record all of this information in an inspection record that can ship along with the engine.
These solutions can also be used to error-proof the process as it is being performed. In this example, this is a reinvention of a traditional pick and place type of operation. The bins are being highlighted so that the worker can be sure they are picking the right parts for the assembly as they work. These are the types of capabilities help ensure that the right parts are being picked even in mixed model environments where there is a unique SKU in each build.
Additional Visual Factory Use Cases
Digital Management Operating System
Some of the visual controls we discussed up front can be directly translated to digital visual controls. Some of these are listed below:
When these controls are digitized, they have all the advantages discussed earlier. They can be automatically updated, they can be seen from anywhere, and the math will even be correct every time!
Setup Support
Adding support setups is something simple that has made a huge difference in many customers. For example, adding a setup countdown clock can heavily influence behaviors. Imagine a setup is supposed to take 17 minutes. Once the setup begins, the clock starts counting down from 17. It is amazing how much that reduces the variation in the setup time. Something really simple like that can make a big difference. Having work instructions and other visual cues for the setup can make a big difference as well.
Autonomous maintenance
In many organizations, operators are given the responsibility and accountability for performing routine maintenance but are given little support in the execution of these tasks.
Imagine that when the operator shows up at their station, they receive the information that they need on a daily basis. For example, the system could give them an interactive list of the autonomous maintenance tasks they're supposed to perform today. Then it would support them to check them off as they go. In addition, they can have the instructions for that task displayed right at the station or even on an AR display. This helps to enable them to perform the tasks much more regularly and effectively.
Closing Thoughts
First, implementing these advanced visual controls is not meant to eliminate Gemba walks. Management still needs to go to where the work happens. It's just good that when they go to there, they have the information about the process performance and other relevant data. Instead of choosing to be at the machine or at the white board, they can be at the machine and see the data. It makes the Gemba walks much more powerful.
Also, for everyone in the plant, they should have a real-time view of whether they are winning or losing that day – whatever winning and losing mean to that individual. Having these displays out on the floor and local to the different stations and people helps to drive the right behaviors from everyone. This way you can make sure that all of your people are in a position to win every single day.
Finally, here is a summary of answers to the common objections to automation of visual controls. The organization can become a true data-driven culture by putting the standard work in place to utilize the information, improve the process, and integrate data into the way that work is performed every day within the plant. That's how you maintain people’s fingerprints on the process. That's how you maintain the ownership as opposed to people writing numbers on a whiteboard.
What are your thoughts? Do you still believe that manual controls should be used instead of digital? Why is that the case?
Send me a message if you'd like to talk about implementing Digital Visual Factory in your company!
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Solutions Leader | AI Revenue & Automation Pioneer | Executive Coach
2 年Great read and spot on! To take this further, how could Industry 4.0 be utilized effectively in our multiple layers of government for transparency, effectiveness, and identifying gaps/inefficiencies? #datamakesitbetter #I4.0 #challengethestatusquo
Technology Sales Director | Problem Solver | Customer Collaborator | McCombs BBA & MBA
2 年John Watkins - this is in line with a topic we discussed yesterday.
Marketing Manager at CrowdStrike
2 年Great content, Tim Stuart!