Manufacturer Trades Labor for Machine Uptime
An automotive parts manufacturer's Downtime Reports indicated that his coil-fed stamping presses were experiencing a combined average of 60 hours per week of downtime for raw material replenishment. The average cost of downtime on these presses is approximately $200 per hour.
Until ShopFloorConnect was installed, this downtime went largely unnoticed because coil changes are part of the standard operating procedure when running these types of machines. ShopFloorConnect indicated that the downtime was 3 times greater than what the user expected based on previous time studies.
The previous time studies did not take into account the time that the machine operator had to spend locating material and operating a crane to position the coil for installation. ShopFloorConnect did.
Based on this information, the manufacturer was able to justify hiring a junior setup person to monitor the area (using ShopFloorConnect's Factory Viewer) to identify the machines that were due for a coil change, then locate the material and stage it so that the operator could quickly replenish the machine when the old coil ran out.
The end result was a downtime reduction of 66%. The manufacturer traded 40 hours of labor at $25/hour for 40 hours of uptime worth $200/hour.