Plastics, injection moulding specialists, have been an advocate of production monitoring since 1982 when they installed a BMSvision (Dextralog) FSX monitoring system. Since then they have continuously upgraded the system, latterly with the PlantMaster Windows® based Manufacturing Execution System (MES).
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“The use of the BMSvision system has been one of the major contributing factors that have enabled us to remain competitive over all these years. We’ve had great value from the system. don’t think we could function efficiently without it,” said Julian van Wyngaarden, Managing Director of the family company, which was started by his father in 1950.
Holloid Plastics manufacture between two to three million components a month across a wide range of industries, including office equipment, child care, lighting, burglar alarms and water softeners.
“Holloid strive to provide a very high quality manufacturing service, so that we can give customers what they need at the right price. It is also important that our short runs are profitable, which is one of the reasons why we have installed robotic handling equipment on our machines. Whatever the run length, it is essential to keep very tight control of our production from planning through to injection moulding, which is why we rely on the BMSvision system to monitor accurately all our machines ranging from 30 to 650 tonnes,” he explained.
Scheduling visibility
“Holloid also have to be very flexible to manufacture such a wide range of components with a lot of tool changes. Twelve tool changes in a day would not be unusual. In order to process urgent orders, we constantly have to re-prioritise our workload and that is where the automated BMSvision scheduling system is such a bonus because you can see the jobs in the pipeline,” he explained.
A BMSvision Data Unit on each of the machines monitors a range of activities and reasons for down-time. These include set-up times, cycle times and the required order quantity against the actual, so that our machine minders can immediately see the balance. PlantMaster also monitors the amount of material needed to finish the job avoiding both stock out and over stock situations.
OEE on target
The PlantMaster machine layout is displayed on a monitor on the shop floor and colour coded to show at a glance if machines are running, idle or exceeding the cycle time. PlantM aster displays all the information collected from the Data Units in real-time, together with the job code. Holloid produce daily reports, so that they can compare the OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) against a number of targets.
“We are constantly looking to improve our service levels and there is a lot of information the BMSvision system can give us that could help us in this area. For example, we can look at the historical data to analyse performance where one job is manufactured on a number of machines, to see whether some machines run better than others and the reasons why. We currently transfer the data from our sales order processing system to the BMSvision software manually but are in the process of implementing an MRP system and automatically linking the BMSvision system to it.”
Holloid also intend to add a process monitoring facility to the BMSvision system, in order to measure changes of cooling water temperature, (amongst other parameters), at each moulding machine to further improve consistency of production
Wireless
Finally Julian plans to upgrade the existing Data Units on the BMSvision system, some of which are twenty years old and still going strong. “The hard-wired Data Units have been exceptional value but they won’t go on for ever. I am now talking to BMSvision about their latest wireless technology for collecting data from the machines, which will be more cost–effective and simpler to install.”
