Everyone understands the effect of poor quality on customer satisfaction, but what about the impact on the manufacturing plant’s process efficiency?  In most processes, raw material quality issues can have a devastating impact.

Consider the following example:

In a case packing line, an Acumence dashboard alerts the operation of excessive scrap at the case packer.

Case Packer Alert on Acumence Dashboard

Further analysis shows that the scrap has increased rapidly over the last two hours, and the primary cause has been quality of the glue used to seal the case.

Hourly Scrap

Identification of quality issues with a raw material lot can help a great deal with reducing scrap and downtime.  In this example, poor quality of the glue caused a jam in the case packer, resulting in excessive scrap and excessive downtime to clear the jam.

The Acumence alert, and further investigation of the cause, resulted in the identification of a change in glue lots in the previous hour.  Acumence reporting was used to query spoilage by lot ID zeroing in on the culprit supplier lot number.

Within minutes of the initial alert, line operators were able to replace the contents of the glue pellet hopper with another lot, minimizing scrap and excessive downtime which are two key drivers of efficiency loss.

In addition, the supply chain manager used the Indicator Production Analysis report to identify the spoilage caused by this supplier’s offending lot over time.

Indicator Production Analysis report

By demonstrating an excessive scrap rate, the company was able to get a credit from the supplier.

Armed with systematically collected and immediately available data, this operation quickly avoided a potentially costly situation.

In summation, Acumence allows you to:

• Use hourly production alerts to identify problems quickly
• Use additional dashboards and reports to identify the time and cause of scrap
• Swap out raw material to eliminate the problem and resume production
• Identify material lot and request a refund from the supplier