6 demolishing advantages of Paperless Plant
Just to begin with the most simple of this advantages I will tell you that… plant records cost in an iLEAN paperless plant system less than half the cost of a traditional system. Logically .. because in this environment the records are made one time in paper and another in the computer. While with iLEAN they are entered only one time in the touchscreen or tablet, and then this goes automatically to the ERP. Besides the reduction in time and efforts, estimations unveil that this method eliminates about 90% of record typos that are usual in paper systems.
iLEAN has been built as a set of work assitants for the plant personnel. And through its touchscreens it helps operators solve their usual workplace questions, just to obtain AUTOMATICALLY the plant records that before we used to gather in paper, as a simple aftermath of the assistants used by them.
Keep in mind that this is a completely groundbraking idea... it is just as if somebody wanting to have a registry of my city movements decided, instead of asking me to record everything in a paper, to let me a GPS device for driving through the city with my car. I would use it on my own will, but… at the end of the day this assitant / GPS would record all the data that the person wanted, with all the details concerning time spent and distance covered by me in the day. And all at a cost really near zero ...isn't it?... Well, this is just iLEAN's approach in plant.
Other curious paperless plant effect, is that few days after implementation the staff understand that with the arrival of iLEAN blue screens, if you make a good job in the factory or you don't, this information is uploaded immediately without distortion to the person who need to know. In other words, the discover that it has become impossible to appropiating the work of other peers or hide their own inefficiencies or errors. Now if you want to be considered, you only have to do a good job and report it adeccuately in iLEAN, so that this information goes to where it has to go. A controller can understand that all this years the operators knew that the paper reports were completely unuseful to control the personnel efficiency and the curious effect that… only by hanging the iLEAN blue screens the working center productivity increases even before making anything with the collected data.
The fourth advantage is something that surely at this point you already intuit and is… the huge change in the paradigm that an iLEAN paperless plant system generates moving from a push system to a pull one in the way to collect plant data. Controllers carry a lifetime asking factory staff to record their activity in papers that they do not feel comfortable with and with which they have a sense of lack of utility for themselves. And sometimes we even discover that we have wasted enormous amounts of money and efforts in control systems that generates a mountain of papers with unreliable data, that implant a deficient control that further often vanishes due to the fact that the reports wer not fulfilled every time there was a minimal excuse to do so. I'm afraid that this would not surprise us. And that is for this same human psycologic principle that in an iLEAN system the data simply flows from your desktop in real time each and every day. Simply because the staff at plant uses the assistants that generate this data for the utility they find in their daily work, they use them because they give them a service... it is just that simple.
In a traditional factory the quality departments have been considered always as a bit bureaucratic departments, in charge of assuring that the products we provide to the market comply with determined quality standards that many consider just as a cost. In a paperless plant they become a key cog in the wheel, that launch automatic alerts to the rest of the production team when their quality controls result to be out of range. Offering an invaluable information in real time to react and adjust what it is needed just on time, before the error propagates and becomes an irreparable cost at the end of the journey. This along with other iLEAN functions build a kind of a “digital nervous system” that connects us to the plant and allows us detect any problem far earlier and narrow it in a fraction of the time we needed in the traditional plant, driving us to efficiency and productivity levels that were unthinkable with the old control model.
With the iLEAN touchscreen terminals, tablets or smartphones, the system establishes a direct communication line with the whole operative staff at plant, supervisors, controllers, quality personnel, maintenance staff…
And this connection is used for two extraordinary functions:
First, to propagate in a minimum time any change or reprogramming in the jobs needed due to an incident or planning maladjustment. Sending all this new orders in seconds to all the involved staff, sinchronizing the operation and minimizing the downtime that this kind of situation generates.
And a second and even more revolutionary functionality that allow to drive our operators to the most efficient way to solve any circumstance. With simple wizards in the iLEAN touchscreens, that they can follow very easily. Allowing to implement this way Lean Manufacturing methodologies for increasing plant productivity with a staff almost unconscious of this fact.
That is finally what i-LEAN means … making Lean Manufacturing easier... and that is the illusion for which we work every day in this firm.
In this line, if you think that perhaps we can be useful for you in some of your projects fill in the form at the right and we will be pleased to help you with your needs.
