Software avoids production 'bottlenecks'

Hydraulics manufacturer can now monitor the production status and performance of its machine tools in real time and the software's planning prevents production 'bottlenecks'.

Sterling Hydraulics is well in the forefront of the design and manufacture of components and assemblies for the hydraulics industry and has created an enviable track record over its 70 year history of employing the latest production engineering and quality control techniques.

The company is ever aware of the benefits of moving forward, qualified by its recent investment in the latest turning centre and CNC sliding head machine tool technology.

Management also felt it was timely to take greater control over its existing production technology and in order to increase efficiency and productivity, be more aware of actual production costs against original planning.

Says Richard Hillier senior planning engineer at the Crewkerne, Somerset site: "Following a demonstration of the Seiki Systems Networked Manufacturing System (NMS) software it became immediately apparent that it offered exactly what we were looking for.

It gave us a 'real time' manufacturing system capturing live data in a paperless manufacturing environment involving our CNC machine tools." "But," he insists, "it gives us much more, we have Seiki Systems Quality Level DNC system to control programs that immediately made our existing DNC system obsolete.

We can now manage work throughput, identify bottlenecks very quickly and control job allocation and production, monitor breakdowns and maintenance and have the capability to compare actual to predicted production costs." Based at its current site in Crewkerne, Somerset for the past 43 years Sterling Hydraulics now employs 300 people in the design, development and manufacture of components and assemblies such as hydraulic cartridge valves, pressure and flow control valves, load control valves and solenoid and proportional solenoid valves.

The company also designs and manufactures customised manifold blocks.

Always at the vanguard of production and quality engineering techniques, it introduced cellular manufacturing as early as 1993, gained IS09001 accreditation in 1994 and implemented lean manufacturing processes in 2000.

With such a background of influencing production, the company has attracted, and continues to service, notable customers including Caterpillar and JCB.

Other recent high profile projects include parts for the wheel deployment/retraction system on the Gibbs Aquada ?aquacar, as well as active suspension parts for the world land speed record-breaking Thrust SSC.

The installation and commissioning of NMS by Brighton-based Seiki Systems passed without hitch and Sterling Hydraulics now has several PC stations running the system throughout its shopfloor and office network.

To date, 11 of its CNC machine tools are controlled via the Seiki DNC link to NMS, including a cross-section of machining centres and turning centres, the majority of which utilise Fanuc controls.

The system is based on using three shopfloor NMS-driven PC stations to control groups of three or four machine tools arranged in cells, such as Daewoo Ace H400P machining centres and one OKK machining centre which is used to produce bespoke manifold blocks.

In the short term the company is planning expansion of the system by hooking up a further four machines, including the companys two latest acquisitions, Pollards Mori-Seiki and NC Enginerings Citizen M32 sliding head lathe.

Following the training of Hillier he now undertakes responsibility for training shopfloor personnel, cell leaders and managers that require knowledge of the system.

"The support we have received from Seiki Systems since day one has been excellent," he says, "which has enabled me to pass on information to everyone else." With NMS installed, Sterling Hydraulics can now monitor the production status and performance of its machine tools in real time.

The softwares planning capabilities identify and thus enable bottleneck scenarios to be prevented, enabling orders to flow without a hitch.

PCs positioned within the manufacturing cells enable operators to see exactly what jobs are scheduled with priorities highlighted and Richard Hillier is complimentary on the way the system can be configured by arranging data and information in the most useable format to enhance the appearance on the PC screens.

The NMS machine status display covers: machines in production, waiting, under maintenance and housekeeping.

It also provides alarm settings and programming data.

Each display has various sub-menus that can be pulled up to provide more detailed information.

Screen data can also be viewed with respect to a specific job, part number or machine with the facility to produce a range of bar and pie charts along with numerous tabulated lists to show the detailed performance information in any of these areas.

Explains Hillier: "One of the biggest benefits NMS offers is its ability to compare our planned results with what has actually happened.

This information is proving to be invaluable in our continuous improvement programme that provides the motivation to keep the company moving forward.

At first, the implementation of NMS seemed like a massive step change for us but it was soon up and running and the process became painless." He continues to explain in more detail: "As early as goods inwards receives raw material into stock we can assign finished component due dates and create the load work against the pertinent machine tool.

We can even go so far as to designate the working shift.

It is also so easy to add new machines to the system." Operators at Sterling Hydraulics have restricted access to the system, but the different areas of the company can have the information tailored to suit each user.

This means they can view each component program on the screen editor.

However, any requested changes to the program are automatically sent back to the server for verification by the production engineering team before the original program can be overwritten.

There could have been a problem because of shift patterns so cell leaders are given authorisation to make changes outside normal working hours rather than lose production time.

At present the companys kanban system is linked into NMS, though further automation is planned for spring 2005 with the integration of the companys MRP system into NMS, and Seiki Systems Planning Board module will be installed: "The beauty of NMS is that its flexibility allows us to add and build the system according to our needs," says Hillier.

He then follows on to explain: "With NMS being easily integrated into the Graphical Work Planning Board, scheduling systems or ERP systems we can even transfer work queues via an interactive queue system.

The system can also be integrated to PDM/PLM systems enabling the access of data via a configurable interface." Hillier maintains that it has become very difficult to quantify the savings from the installation of NMS: "Our previous system used what we called ?knock on wall technology whereby the computer had to be made ready to receive any information before it was sent.

NMS is totally different because it provides a complete ?handshake which means the amount of legwork and record keeping for both operators and production engineers, has been reduced dramatically.

It is also difficult to quantify because the system is influencing so many areas of the business.

Just by controlling work flow and minimising bottlenecks provides a major saving giving us a further edge over our competition and improving utilisation of very expensive machine tools.".

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