Leading chemical giant builds a smart manufacturing system by integrating its people, methods and machines using mobivue manufacturing operations management
Industry: Chemicals
Number of Plants: 1
Business impact: Reduced man-hours by 30 Mins per production cycle
About
The client is a market leader in manufacturing tyre cord fabrics, supplying to all major tyre companies in India. They started as a manufacturer of Nylon Tyre Cord Fabrics (NTCF) in 1974 and are the first tyre cord company outside Japan to win the Deming Prize in 2004. Spread across 43 acres of land, the Gwalior plant manufactures 29200 tons of N6 chips, 26800 tons of yarn and 21600 tons of tyre cord fabric in a year.
Challenges
The client wanted to reduce the production cycle time of their cord manufacturing process by optimizing operations on the cable cord 4 (CC4) machine. The paper tubes (bobbins) used for cord manufacturing were reusable assets and had to be given a new barcode identity in every production cycle. The operators had to manually place barcodes more than 2000 such paper tubes and map them into the system before starting a new manufacturing cycle. This manual process was extremely time-consuming and delayed every production cycle by a minimum of 15-20 minutes. Moreover, the existing system failed to provide visibility on the movement of paper tubes making it difficult to track them, resulting in loss of assets. There were errors in asset mapping due to the duplication of barcodes that created inaccuracy in captured data.
The weighbridge process required the operator to scan 60 bobbins individually and manually update the weight and trolley number to map these assets and generate a trolley card. The process didn't validate the conditioning time for bobbins before moving them to the next process, thereby affecting the quality of output.
Why mobivue manufacturing operation management
BCI's team did an extensive operator level process study at the Gwalior plant and proposed mobivue RFID-powered manufacturing operations management solution