Lean Manufacturing And WIP Visibility
By David Orain, Omnitrol Networks

Most manufacturers have been slowly implementing Lean Production methodologies for years. The goals are to reduce labor costs, keep less inventory, minimize time to market, and become highly responsive to customer requirements to produce high quality, error-proofed products efficiently at low cost.

Two major concepts drive Lean Manufacturing: JIT (flow) and autonomation (smart automation). Real time visibility on production floor is an essential piece of maintaining optimal production flow for the manufacturer, its suppliers and customers. Autonomation provides machines or process controls intelligence to recognize when they are working abnormally and flag this for human attention.

Lean is focused on getting the right things, to the right place, at the right time, in the right quantity to achieve perfect work flow while minimizing waste and being flexible and able to change. However, actually measuring and observing workflow in real time is a key missing piece of even the most flexible, efficient production environment.

Most importantly, all of these concepts have to be understood, appreciated, and embraced by the actual employees who build the products and therefore own the processes. Implementing a WIP Visibility system on the edge of the network, on the actual production floor, focuses on the production staff first and the back-end systems second. An automated WIP visibility system will be able to immediately infer production bottlenecks or quality issues and flag machine operators as soon as the problem is found, followed by management update via back-end ERP integration.

Today's attempts at providing WIP visibility are complicated by the need to integrate various back-end systems from ERP to accounting and logistics. The lack of integration limits the amount of useful and timely information available to the manufacturer. In addition, without data processing on the production floor or standardization in devices and user interface, it is very difficult to maintain real-time WIP data without seriously impacting production efficiency.

Real-time visibility on materials, process, or machine interactions can be leveraged to fix real-time production problems by quickly identifying the source, to enable product recalls, or to validate the end product for customers who are increasingly demanding detailed knowledge on the contents, delivery dates, and history of the material, parts, or end products they are buying.

A WIP Visibility solution offers discrete manufacturers the ability to manage and view all aspects of their manufacturing process from PO to finished product and maintain pedigree data (component lot number, machine operator id, and inspection records).

About David Orain
As Vice-President of Marketing, David is responsible for defining and executing Omnitrol Networks' worldwide product and marketing strategy. David brings 15 years of strategic marketing, sales, and engineering experience in developing high-growth industry solutions. Most recently, David was Director of Strategy and Marketing for the telecommunications industry group at Sun Microsystems where he successfully repositioned the company in the OSS/BSS, SDP, IMS and wireless data markets. During his 9 years tenure at Sun, David also held technical and sales management positions including head of the team developing Sun's telecommunications solutions.