Thermolympic S.L.

 
  • Thermolympic S.L.
  • Location: Zaragoza, Spain
  • Specialist in field of thermoplastic injection moulding, in design and construction of the moulds used in this process
  • Family owned business, established since 1971
  • 60 employees
  • 8.000 sqm floor space
  • Customer base from original equipment manufacturers in automotive industry to suppliers of end consumer products for supermarkets

The FACTS4WORKERS solution at Thermolympic

 


Context of use

 
Paperless information management for production workers


  • Cast: about 60 employees
  • Operators manufacture a great diversity of automotive or consume 
parts like filters, interior panels, door panels, baskets or humidifiers
  • Many of the parts have own components that are assembled with the 
help of different automatic and manual tools

 


Challenges

 
  • Much information on the workfloor is yet not digital. The flow from digital documents stored in servers to paper increases the chances to get the physical documents quickly outdated
  • Feedback from the operators to the management lacks of detail and is hard to manage
  • The actual way of work reduce the chances to access to specific trainings and detailed knowledge about their workplaces, reducing operator opportunity to grow and acquire most relevant positions in the company

 


Room for improvement

 
  • Faster and easier access to real-time information
  • Collect detailed feedback (bi-directional communication)
  • Reducing cognitive overload: Proactive messages from production machine; automating some of quality checks to reduce stress
  • Improve quality control by using visual and commodity measurement-tool

 


Potential benefits

 
  • Increased possibilities to solve problem by operator and drive (small) innovations
  • Improve the communication and feedback between workers, team leaders and management in different shifts
  • Easier access to relevant information in updated state
  • Increasing quality of products

 

The FACTS4WORKERS solution
@ Thermolympic S.L.


The Facts4workers solution provides the workers with all relevant information for the production of plastic components, the quality management, the training of operators and the machine maintenance.


Field of applicaton

Core functionality

Benefit of the FACTS4WORKERS solution

Impact dimension

top


 

Field of application



  • Many of the parts have own components that are assembled with the help of different automatic and manual tools
  • Training of workers is fundamental to assure a good quality level
THO produces complete pieces or process prefabricated work pieces as well as piece components. The components are assembled into intermediate or final products before shipping to the customer. THOs customer base ranges from original equipment manufacturers in the automotive industry to suppliers of end consumer products for supermarkets. THO aims for maximum production quality and works in close cooperation with its customers from the simulation and design activities to the actual manufacturing process and, finally, to the quality control and shipping. The biggest challenge is that much information is yet not digital and therefore most of the information is quickly outdated. Therefore, Thermolympic mostly wants to improve real time data collection and analysis.

 

Core functionality


 

Defect and Solutions


The solution provide access to a repository of solutions for most of the issues that arise during production. The developed system is fed by the workers and act as a Knowledge Management System, able to support the sharing of knowledge among the workers. This solution will enable the definition of a collaborative environment where workers could support each other’s by creating a common knowledge database. The management of roles will protect the workers from unfair activities, meaning those activities that are not within the capabilities and expertise of the worker. The workers could comment and describe defects and solutions by using media content (text, video, audio).


 

Process monitoring


Process monitoring will allow the workers to have a continuous feedback about the status of the process and enable them to take improvement actions as soon as a negative trend is detected. The process monitoring is based on the direct connection of the F4W solution to the PLC of the injection machines. The parameters that will be monitored will be, for example, injection temperature, injection time, etc.


 

Shared documents



The access to shared documents on the spot will allows the workers to gain in autonomy and reduce their stress about missing information. The documents available in the on-line repository will include manuals, quality control sheets and all the required info to maintain a single component of the assembly line.

 

Training


The solution will provide a support for training acivities, that will enable the wokrrs to increase its skills and improve its competences. The training module will be based on the output of workers’ activities and will be automatically tuned on the errors and competence gaps of the workers.

 
 

 
Benefit of the FACTS4WORKERS solution

THO – Fixing the production of faulty parts

Before

Before


Carla is working on a machine and is taking measures as usual. Lots of parts are out of spec and she realizes that the machine produces faulty parts. This is an emergency situation and Carla is immediately looking for Eduardo, the team leader, as she cannot fix the problem herself. Eduardo stops the machine. Together they analyse the faulty parts and try to figure out the reason for the wrong production. In the meantime the machine stands still and THO is losing precious production time. If it is a common error Eduardo knows what to do and can adjust the machine accordingly. If the error is not so common, Eduardo has to test various settings on the machine to correct it. In both cases Eduardo first has to inspect and analyse the documentation of the latest parts manually, He then has to rely on his gut feeling and engineering skills to solve this.

After

After


Carla is at the shop floor handling faulty products, when she realizes that the machine produces wrong parts in mass quantities. This is an emergency situation and Carla looks at her tablet which displays the current error in a useful overview. The tablet is also connected to the THO quality cloud and analyzes the errors in real time. There-fore, the tablet notifies her that this has to be a mechanical error. Because the tablet also knows the machine settings and the solution to this kind of error, it also tells her how to adjust the machine accordingly. Now Carla don’t need to stop the machine but can solve the problem on the fly in her own. If the problem is more serious she can contact the previous worker on this machine or the craft master over the tablet and ask them for more information or help. Furthermore the error warning and all the changes made on the machine are automatically documented and sent to quality man-agement in real time. Hence they are aware of this issue and can interfere if necessary and furthermore everything is documented permanently which improves quality management and improves error analysis and error handling in the future.

 

THO - Self-paced training on the job

Before

Before


Carla is working the machines as usual and checking parts for errors on a sample basis. Today she is faster than the machine and she wants to spend the “saved” time in-between for some self-improvement. She wants to enhance her knowledge about the machine she is working on. The only information available and in reach are printed on a large unhandy sheet of paper which is fixed to a wall nearby. The plan is outdated and does not consider the latest molding modules and machine settings; it is also already yellowed and therefore not easy to read. Furthermore, the plan is fixed to a wall where Carla can’t keep an eye on her current production line. Due to these conditions, Carla’s motivation to learn something new is nipped in the bud and she turns around walking back to the production line.

After

After


Carla is working the machine as usual. Because she only has to handle the faulty parts, she has some “saved” time now and then. She wants to use this time to improve her knowledge about the machine she is working on. She takes her F4W tablet and opens the details about the current machine, but she could also select other machines as well. In the application on the F4W tablet, she can learn about the machine and the production process on various levels of detail supported by rich media in form of textual description, pictures and interactive videos. The application also shows the current combination of molding module, machine configuration and error statistics so Carla can get a better understanding of critical combinations. She does this more often now because she can learn on her own and in her own pace. Furthermore, she can use the tablet right next to her production line and can still keep an eye on it. She also gets notified by the tablet if some parts show an error so she won’t miss it.

Carla is especially interested in the last steps of the process as this is where she gets involved. Due to her long term experience she notices two tiny things she would change. This could make her life easier and speed up the process as well. She wants to make a suggestion to improve this, but she doesn’t want to write it all down because she has no time for this and is not used to write on tablets. So Carla just tags the last machine part as “Improvable”. At the end of her shift her line manager sees this flag and talks to Carla about her suggestion.

 

THO - Evaluating real time data

Before

Before


Jose, the quality manager has a meeting with the management. He presents the latest data from the shop floor. However, the data set is already a week old. All of it was manually measured, written down by hand and then transferred to several Excel files and different persons where involved in this process.

These data give the management a rough idea of what was going on last week. But everybody knows that this data set is somewhat faulty and therefore not 100% reliable and already out of date as well. Therefore, the management can only guess and rely on their gut feeling what could be the biggest issue right now. Due to this situation they are very conservative when planning the next product line and promise to deliver only small quantities. This underperformance will affect their annual revenue.

After

After


Jose, the quality manager has a meeting with the management. He is proud to present the latest data from the shop floor. Because this time he can present neat statistics and live data collected by different F4W solutions like automated error reports. Due to the high accuracy of the data, a clear representation and various ways of analysis, they quickly discover that some mechanical problems often occur during summer time. This leads to the idea to invest in a (better) air conditioning. A simple simulated production process under improved temperature conditions shows much better results.

 

THO - Detailed guidelines increase reassembly speed

Before

Before


The production line changes and with it, the injection molding machine has to be reas-sembled by Eduardo. THO introduced a new product so the injection mold module is new to him. He has to look at the technical drawings and the specifications of each part. However, they are quite bulky and unhandy and the important part is always on a fold and therefore not easy to read. Furthermore, the plans did not consider the cus-tom made parts in the machine. He therefore needs several attempts to assembly eve-rything correctly. He also had to make some adjustments which were not described in the technical drawings. So far he is the only person available who knows this as there is no possibility for him to document this change appropriately. Altogether he had to stop the machine for at least half an hour, until the production line is ready again and he could not document the whole process on his preferred high level of de-tail.

After

After


The production line changes and with it, the injection molding machine has to be reas-sembled by Eduardo. THO introduced a new product so the injection mold module is new to him. Eduardo looks at his F4W tablet which holds all the necessary infor-mation about the assembly process. Next to the technical drawings, which can be zoomed in on a preferred level, there are also two small movie clips. They describe the tricky steps when repositioning the new mold module in a very comprehensive way. Furthermore, the reassembly process is described in detail, annotated with com-ments from colleagues and other team leaders how to solve tricky steps. If these comments are not sufficient, Eduardo could contact the author directly through the tablet via text chat or request his attendance at the machine. Besides this, Eduardo can now document every step of the process accordingly with the help of a checklist and additional photos and comments if necessary. As a result Eduardo could skip the try and error process and assembly the machine in no time. He furthermore im-proved the documentation so that next time he will be even faster.

 

 

Impact dimension


Improvement with regard to influencing factors.