30 / 44
28
Mechanical Technology — August 2016
⎪
Local manufacturing and beneficiation
⎪
I
spend a lot of time on our customers’
manufacturing lines – from those
run by OEMs through to their tier
one and tier two partners and on to
component suppliers. Despite differences
between these companies, the managers
who run their production lines talk of
common issues: competition is sharper
than ever; costs are under pressure; com-
pliance and legislation are onerous; raw
material prices are generally on the up;
and there’s a drive to accelerate produc-
tion. Then there’s the consumer: people’s
changing expectations have seen the gulf
separating mass production to made-to-
order customisation narrowing fast.
Personalisation is now a key trend:
first in food (customised M&M
®
s any-
one?) and now with consumer goods,
people want things made for them.
Take the Vauxhall Adam – it has over a
million variants, the Citroën DS3 offers
three million combinations and the 2015
Dodge Viper and Viper SRT really can
be ‘one-of-a-kind’ cars with a stagger-
ing 25-million possible configurations.
Indeed, if building things wasn’t already
complex it’s becoming more so.
The ‘more’ era
How do I sum up these challenges? In a
word: ‘more’. I see the need to produce
more, more quickly, to achieve more cost
and time savings, to find ways to manage
more compliance, and, ultimately to be
more efficient.
This article by David Stain, senior vertical marketing manager for manufacturing
and retail at Zebra Technologies, the US-based enterprise asset intelligence
specialist, talks about modern trends in manufacturing and the solutions that
allow plant operators to see what is happening in the enterprise in real time,
helping them to make smarter and faster decisions.
Stages and gates situated throughout a
manufacturing plant provide a continuous
stream of performance data and therefore,
visibility over the progress of the line.
Issues such as booking-in taking too much time, looking for a missing
pallet and relying on paper instructions to guide put-away can be
overcome by using RFID readers and instructions can be sent to mobile
computers to help people efficiently put away stock.
Track and trace
for
manufacturing efficiency
Just as we need to find new ways
to work more effectively, the Internet
of Things (IoT) promises to achieve it.
IoT describes an environment where
barcodes and smart sensors connected