What is the Hidden Factory?

The hidden factory represents the untapped capacity of your manufacturing plant – the maximum amount of additional production that can be unlocked! 

The term “hidden factory” was popularized by Armand Feigenbaum in the late 1970s. Feigenbaum’s concept of the hidden factory was primarily focused on quality, specifically the waste and costs caused by “bad work”, much of which is “hidden” below the surface of day-to-day operations.

Today most companies justify the status quo in their operations rather than identifying "hidden factory" activities and work on its root-causes.    

What has Industry 4.0 got to do with the hidden factory?

Six Big Losses and another well-known term Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) is a Part of the Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) methodology invented by Seiichi Nakajima in the 1960s. 

The link between these two concepts is clear – deal with the six losses, and you’ll improve the OEE of your operation.

While the concept looks easy and self-explanatory, Industry 3.0 has been struggling with collecting manufacturing data manually. While it’s a good start, it’s not fast enough and cannot keep pace with the dynamism of the manufacturing process where data sets change quickly. They change with batch, product, weather, operator, machine, shift, etc.   

Industry 4.0 leverages technology to bridges this gap. Real-time data acquisition helps to measure and analyze events on a real-time basis. Most PLCs installed on a machine provide streaming data of production activity. Intelligent software can easily dig into the streaming data to identify the activities that are responsible for the Six Big Losses i.e. the most common causes of productivity loss. 

The strength of this approach is the idea that even minor inefficiencies add up and hurt the OEE. Hence these insights help prioritize and drive daily managerial actions and management resources to improve manufacturing.

Hence Digitisation helps achieve the dream of a factory with around-the-clock perfect production which manufactures only good pieces, as fast as possible, with no downtime, every hour of every day! 

Pima is an industry leader providing technology to the manufacturing industry over 3 decades. They can help achieve your dream of a perfect factory.

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