Industry 4.0, digital twins, and the Industrial Internet of Things. These are some of the latest buzzwords and concepts getting the most attention today.
And for good reason: They all promise to drive efficiency gains and slash costs, while sparking innovation and otherwise revolutionizing manufacturing, making life easier for everyone from assembly line workers and technicians to engineers and managers.
But, for the most part, even early adopters are just starting to develop strategies for these technologies. Implementation will require considerable time, resources, and commitment.
In the meantime, there are plenty of other tools that manufacturers can use to boost productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction—and likely with a much faster ROI. Many of them have been around for decades, once the shiny new objects themselves but have since fallen by the wayside or are grossly under utilized. The names are ubiquitous: Six Sigma. Lean. Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFM/DFA). Kanban. Poka-Yoke. Taguchi Optimization. In some cases, they’ve even been combined and streamlined into mega-solutions, such as Lean Six Sigma, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS), and DFX (as in design for excellence and/or everything).
Motorola pioneered modern Six Sigma practices, which use data analysis to drive process changes, in the early 1980s. The goal is to improve quality levels to a limit of 3.4 defects per million (six sigma) parts or opportunities.
Companies hired and trained armies of “black and green belt” experts to implement the process and mentor others in the organization, with some well-documented success stories. General Electric CEO Jack Welch, for example, famously championed Six Sigma in the mid-1990s to help save the company $2.5 billion in five years.
There’s been somewhat of a resurgence in recent years of these programs, with an increasing emphasis on design, as next-generation engineers and managers come to the forefront and look for “new” ideas to make their mark. In fact, DFM/DFA and DFX courses currently are among the most popular offered in Tooling U-SME’s curriculum.
DFSS also is getting a second look. Like DFM/DFA and DFX, DFSS focuses on the up front development of new parts and products rather than tweaks to the in-process production of existing ones. Instead of traditional build-test-fix cycles, design-based systems use an “IDDOV” process—identify, define, develop, optimize, and verify—based on customer input and requirements.
Teamwork is critical. Once a product’s basic parameters, applications, and objectives are identified and weighted in terms of importance, the people responsible for the design, manufacturing, and testing of a product should brainstorm how best to execute their mission. At this time, quantity is king: The more ideas, the better. Then their relative values are measured against each other, which can be done via a simple Pugh Matrix and Excel spreadsheet. Applying an L18 orthogonal array enables nearly 4,400 different combination of factors to be evaluated, while larger arrays can consider more than a billion permutations.
The challenge is to change current mindsets and get engineers to think out of the box during the development process. This will help generate more ideas, and should ultimately produce better results. The advent of Industry 4.0 and other advanced technologies will only enhance benefits, providing even more data. But there’s no need to wait—the clock is always ticking when it comes to continuous improvement.
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