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American Ingenuity is Alive and Well.
Briggs and Stratton develops an OEE solution without breaking the budget |
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Briggs and Stratton, the world's leading manufacturer of air-cooled engines, was founded in 1908 and is headquartered in Milwaukee, WI. Their brands include Ferris, Simplicity, Snapper, Giant Vac, and Murray and today, Briggs and Stratton owns 60 - 70% market share. As with most manufacturers, quality and efficiency in manufacturing is high on the watch list.
Briggs and Stratton has a number of manufacturing facilities with different processes for manufacturing. Some production lines have dedicated production; others change over due to seasonal or demand fluctuations. In all cases however, performance is crucial and Briggs and Stratton has chosen to use OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) as one of their standard KPIs (Key Performance Indicator).
Darrell Morris, a Manufacturing Engineer for Briggs & Stratton, was recently tasked with finding a low-cost system to automatically collect data from the machines on the shop floor for tracking OEE and down time. As Darrell explained, "I knew that finding a system would not be a problem, as there are several companies that make software that would fit the bill. The problem would be the "low-cost" part. I have dealt with machine control and software enough to understand that to software vendors, "low-cost" means tens of thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands, but I also know that "low-cost" to my boss often means hundreds of dollars, rather than thousands, thus, the dilemma."
Another Manufacturing Engineer in the plant had looked into software for data acquisition, to collect and archive cycle times. That background was furthered for this project. The past project reviewed solutions from two leading automation software suppliers, however, due to the cost of the software, this project would have to fall into a capital project category and this expense would be weighed against numerous other projects contending for funding dollars. Higher priority activities would prevent this project from seeing the light of day. Another solution had to be found.
Darrell reviewed another market leading solution, to confirm the earlier research. All three software solutions seemed like they would do what Briggs and Stratton needed, however, they all had the same problem; the prices would raise this project to a major capital expense level and the project would stall. Another alternative existed, based on technology used many years ago. Briggs and Stratton did have some existing software, capable of creating DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) links to put information from a PLC's data table into an Excel spreadsheet, however, while that would get information out of the machines, it wouldn't be an effective way of archiving that data and would not meet the reliability (24x7x365) levels of operation that a process engineer expects. The ideal solution would be to log equipment data values into a database. Standard database tools could then be used to generate the reports and analysis our management expected. But once again, cost could be an issue, as this solution would be replicated across their many plants
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Darrell was aware of one piece of equipment at the plant, delivered as part of an OEM installation, in which the OEM had used Kepware software to communicate from the machine's PLC to a supervisory PC. This prompted an additional investigation into what Kepware had to offer, and to his surprise, he found Kepware's communication solution KEPServerEX offered a range of connectivity to plant floor equipment as well as connectivity to client software applications. In addition to the communication software for machine data collection, KEPServerEX supported an option called DataLogger, a plug-in for KEPServerEX able to push data to a relational database through the ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) standard. All the pieces seemed to fall in place.
The next step was to assemble a POC (Proof of Concept). The free trial version, available for every Kepware product, was very beneficial and in a matter of minutes, Darrell was able to connect his desktop PC to a test PLC at his desk. The interface for configuring the solution was straightforward and didn't require any training. The DataLogger option was a bit more complex than setting up device communications. In Darrell's words, "I ran into a few things I was unfamiliar with, however I found the help to be an outstanding resource. I downloaded the trial shortly before lunch and by mid-afternoon I was logging data from my PLC into an Access database. Now that I had the mechanics of acquiring and storing the information I wanted, I could concentrate on making sure the PLC was generating the information, and create Access forms for sorting and displaying that information."
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Although it took more work to create the Access interface, the required analytics and the management report, that one time investment would be easily recouped as we roll this solution out across our various plants and manufacturing lines. The final solution will monitor machine status and will capture downtime codes. Downtime codes will fall into a variety of categories, based on the type of the machine, such as Electrical Faults, Mechanical Faults - Spindle Drive Errors, Clamp Problems, Proximity Faults, etc. The operator will enter downtime codes that are not readily collectable. This solution will be able to monitor Briggs and Stratton's wide range of equipment, from PLC based machining centers to the robotics moving components along the line.
"By using Kepware's KEPServerEX OPC server and DataLogger, I was able to provide the low-cost solution for OEE and down time tracking our management was asking for," explained Darrell. "We have worked through some issues with getting the Access queries and forms to display the information the way we want, but the Kepware setup was the easiest part of the project. Once our pilot program is fully operational, we will be able to roll this system out to the rest of the factories for a fraction of the cost of implementing a tracking system in one factory using the market leading solutions we reviewed earlier."
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