From product-specific details to information about overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), our frequently asked questions have the information you need. Get the answers about digitizing your factory, Worximity’s Smart Factory analytics, lean manufacturing, and more.
Worximity’s Smart Factory analytics solution collects factory events or production counts in real time. Our Tileconnect connects your equipment using dry contact cable to feed into the Tile+ dashboard to get real-time data. Managers can display key KPIs on large screens throughout the factory.
Smart Factory data comes from inputs and outputs from the equipment, which is connected to TileConnect using dry contact cable. Collected data helps managers and other stakeholders understand how the equipment is performing through its cycle times or status.
Whether or not you need PLCs depends on the installation. Our Technical Support Specialist and Operational Excellence Specialist (OES) teams will guide you through the process in order to pinpoint the most efficient activation setup.
To install the TileConnect, the only IT information we need is Wi-Fi. Our maintenance team would need power and a machine signal, whether it be PLC, application programming interface (API), or photoelectric sensor.
Installing TileConnect can take as little as 20 minutes. To accomplish this, there must be coordination between your internal teams.
To integrate TileConnect into your existing ERP, our robust API speaks to your different digital ecosystems when it deploys.
With Worximity’s TileConnect, it’s easy to scale to plant-wide just by adding more tiles on the shop floor.
Using lean manufacturing’s Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, managers and other stakeholders can make small, limited-impact changes, measure them, and use them to make decisions on how and when to scale. Practiced consistently, PDCA can bring improvements that lead to serious efficiency gains.
Transforming into a digital factory brings benefits that include better operational efficiencies, increased throughput, and decreased downtime. But knowing what digital factory software solution to choose can be a challenge when it seems like they all do the same thing (they don’t).
The first thing to look for is quality. Will the digital factory software solution give you all the data you need? Can it help you identify causes of downtime? Can it connect all of your machines? If the answer to any of these is no, keep searching for a better solution.
For many companies, the software price tag can be the first and final hurdle. Worximity’s Tile+ and Tilelytics software is affordable and convenient with a number of subscription plans to choose from.
You also want to choose a digital factory software solution that brings quick ROI. Worximity has a Smart Factory ROI calculator for each connected machine. Just fill in the ROI calculator fields and see how fast you can see positive ROI.
Finally, implementation doesn’t have to be long and difficult. With Tileconnect, you can be up and running within 24 hours.
Clients using Worximity’s Smart Factory analytics have seen results that show how valuable our Smart Factory technologies are in helping to increase their profits in less than 90 days by digitizing their operations. Take a look at a few of our Smart Factory analytics case studies:
How Premiere Moisson increased its responsiveness to downtime events by 27 percent.
Worximity’s TileConnect works with your existing equipment to automatically collect production data from your machines, including:
These are the main metrics and KPIs that TileConnect monitors, but managers can choose from more than 150 tiles to measure and see other factory specific data.
To implement an MES requires a multi-phased implementation. Because Worximity’s Smart Factory analytics solution is off-the-shelf, it can be implemented and running within a day.
Most of the time when users cannot login, it is because they’re not using the proper URL or are unintentionally using incorrect credentials. If you’re having trouble logging in, check to make sure you’re using the proper URL https://worximity.tileboard.io/ and credentials. Also note that the Worximity platform works best with Google Chrome.
No. TileConnect is customizable to customer needs and can support 2.4 GHz.
Lean programs sometimes fail because you must create forms to manually gather KPIs. Manual data becomes overwhelming for shop floor employees, preventing them from keeping up with all their other responsibilities. Already pressed for time, once managers manually gather KPIs, they have to analyze them. Without the proper time to manually gather and analyze KPIs, managers lose confidence, and the lean manufacturing project is shut down.
Additionally, lack of engagement is an issue with lean because it is often difficult to learn new ways to make decisions in real time based on data. Lean programs use whiteboards to visualize KPIs from the previous day, a process that is very outdated in our current digital world. Expecting a generation of workers who manage their lives on iPhones to use paper and pen is unrealistic.
Using Smart Factory technologies, factories can implement lean manufacturing principles, so workers get program alerts in a real-time contextual environment. This allows employees to see, learn, and react digitally, which is much faster than looking at a graph on a whiteboard.
Lean manufacturing is a methodology that focuses on minimizing waste within manufacturing systems while simultaneously maximizing productivity.
Benefits of lean manufacturing can include:
Overproduction is one of the lean manufacturing types of waste—the one that has the most significant impact on success. This type of waste happens any time a part, assembly, or final product can’t be used or sold because there is no customer for it. Overproduction is often the result of “just in case” manufacturing. Using Smart Factory analytics, businesses can collect more accurate, real-time data so they can move from being “just in case” manufacturers to being “just in time” manufacturers and reduce overproduction waste.
Industry 4.0 represents the fourth industrial revolution. The focus is on interconnectivity, real-time data, automation, and smart manufacturing. Industry 4.0 is about using modern technology to increase automation and improve communication and process monitoring.
The new IIoT technologies allow the manufacturing industries to digitize and gain interconnectivity, more communication, and data-driven analysis tools.
Manufacturing throughput is a measure of the amount of time it takes for a product to be made. It represents the production rate of an order, product, or item. To put it simply, throughput is the rate of total good units produced divided by the time it took to be produced:
Throughput = Units Produced / Production Time
Cycle time is the number of times a piece of equipment takes to run a full cycle to deliver a product or process. Usually, this means a specific number of cycles per minute. This cycle time is compared to the SKU standard cycle time to calculate effectiveness or productivity using the OEE formula.
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is calculated by multiplying availability, efficiency, and quality rates.
OEE = Availability Rate x Efficiency Rate x Quality Rate
Worximity has a free OEE calculator you can use to get started.
OEE is a crucial metric used to gain an accurate idea of the percentage of planned production time that is productive. OEE helps identify losses, track progress, and support your factory productivity, which makes it one of the most important performance measurements in modern manufacturing facilities.
By optimizing OEE, you can increase capacity, reduce costs, improve quality, and/or increase efficiencies in your production lines. Worximity’s Smart Factory analytics can help manufacturers benchmark and optimize their OEE to increase throughput, decrease downtime, and make cost-saving efficiency improvements.
By measuring OEE, managers gain insight that allows them to properly identify opportunities to improve processes. You can use factory OEE to compare your plant to others in the same industry and see where your benchmark falls within industry standards. OEE also calculates the value gap between current and future states of productivity.
For example:
A factory runs at 1,800 units an hour and is open eight hours per day, 260 days per year.
This factory should pump out 3.7M units annually.
An OEE of 56.5% indicates that the factory is only pumping out 2.1M units annually.
That means that the factory is staffed for 3.7M, equipped for 3.7M, and carries overhead expenses for 3.7M—but produces only 2.1M.
This discrepancy shows up frighteningly quickly on a balance sheet at the end of the month. Where did the money go? This is difficult to figure out 30 days after the fact. But Tile+ eliminates the guessing process with granular data, focusing on quick corrective measures that can be taken and improvements that can be made.
As the name suggests, continuous improvement (CI) is an ongoing effort to improve products, processes, or services by reducing waste and increasing quality. Continuous improvement efforts drive a competitive advantage for manufacturers that get it right. However, consistency is not easy to achieve.
Many factories have had some negative experience with continuous improvement. Many times, employees and leaders feel burned by ineffective continuous improvement "programs" that only really result in busywork such as cleaning up work areas or taping up whiteboards.
When working toward a specific business outcome, the last thing a manager wants to feel is that some other department is forcing their process on them. It is critical when learning about and considering introducing continuous improvement to your organization to be clear about your intent: to improve the business outcomes.
Additionally, continuous improvement should never be considered a "program"—it should be part of factory culture. Introducing CI as a program can immediately set the expectation that it has a start and end date, when what everyone needs to do is improve the way they do business.
Continuous improvement is key to ensuring all company stakeholders have the visibility and information they need to make decisions that will bring efficiencies to every step on the factory floor. It requires management and floor employees to step out of their comfort zones and look at where they are today, set a realistic goal to make improvements, and do what needs to be done to reach that goal.
Once that goal is met, it’s time to start again. Continuous improvement means always finding ways to improve. It doesn’t matter what kind of industry or business you’re in—a continuous improvement approach is necessary to stay ahead of the competition.
In the current manufacturing industry, there is more competition than ever; factories are evolving in a global marketplace where information is available everywhere. Successful organizations are those in a continuous search for improvement using digital factory technologies such as Smart Factory analytics.
For OEE food manufacturing, a benchmark score of 70-78 percent means your factory production is efficient. Here’s a breakdown of OEE scores:
In most cases, a low score can be easily improved through straightforward measures such as tracking stop time reasons and addressing the largest sources of downtime.
Smart Factory technologies can help factories uncover reasons for low OEE scores so managers and other stakeholders can address the problems and enact change.
Manufacturing overhead refers to the depreciation expenses on production equipment. It refers to the costs incurred, regardless of the goods being manufactured or not.
Manufacturing overhead costs can include:
In principle, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) work in the same way. They both connect devices to the internet, making the devices smarter. The difference is that IoT works to make consumers' lives more convenient and easier, whereas IIoT works to increase safety and efficiency on production facilities. IoT is B2C (business-to-consumer) and IIoT is B2B (business-to-business).
For companies with multiple plants and production facilities, the benefits of implementing manufacturing IIoT include the ability to:
These IIot benefits can dramatically improve food manufacturing production efficiency and eradicate a lot of paperwork. For you and your staff, IIoT provides easier access to KPIs, bringing more factory flexibility to avoid costly downtime.
Your Worximity Smart Factory Operational Excellence Specialist (OES) teams will help you determine which problems you should target based on experience with hundreds of other clients. Our Smart Factory analytics will reveal real downtime causes on the shop floor and then convert the downtime causes into dollar amounts where the costliest causes are identified and solved through shop floor employee engagement.
Knowing the true causes of downtime in a factory requires creating a detailed downtime list that is easy for operators to use wherever they are. The true downtime opportunities are usually the ones that are unplanned.
Gathering this information manually won’t yield the most accurate results. However, using automated Smart Factory technologies such as Worximity’s Tileconnect and Tilelytics can give managers accurate, real-time data of their production lines so they can pinpoint the causes of downtime and create key KPI goals.
Worximity uses Tilelytics to benchmark your results against world-class OEE companies and create new production goals.
Worximity has a seven-step OEE journey during which we help factories gain the most from our Smart Factory technologies. The goal is to take one bite at a time, making sure to generate enough gains at each step to auto-finance the next project. The most critical objective is change management.
Moving to digitization in your factory can help increase profits within 90 days. In a digital factory, everything is connected, so managers and other stakeholders can see real-time performance of equipment, workers, and processes.
Using overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) to create benchmarks will show you where your operations stand and where they can be improved, ending the inefficient and inaccurate manual status quo. Smart Factory technologies give managers the power to monitor downtime and production to help to save labor costs, and setting up OEE plans for equipment can help to maximize your investment.
Worximity uses Smart Factory technologies and lean manufacturing expertise to help plant workers reach production goals and improve cross-team collaboration. We’ve helped factories achieve operational excellence and generate value during every step of the production process using our digital factory continuous improvement solutions, including our data-collecting Tileconnect sensors and our Tile+ dashboard.
Worximity’s Smart Factory analytics solution uses automation, but that doesn’t mean it excludes humans. It is crucial to keep stakeholders actively engaged so they can learn to be more efficient.
Our teams don’t just help with implementation. Each original Operational Excellence Specialist (OES) team includes engineering and manufacturing experts who are Six Sigma Black Belt certified. They have the manufacturing experience and the knowledge you need, truly understanding the reality of plant floors. Our OES teams take personal ownership of their accounts, providing food manufacturers with a go-to expert in their efforts to maximize efficiencies across their entire operations.
Worximity’s Smart Factory solutions empower decision-making from the machine level to the shop floor to the business level. By using data to unlock continuous improvement and generate value at every step of the production process, our solutions help manufacturers enact real change, finding efficiencies along the way.
Once a factory has overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) benchmarks and is using digital factory technology to improve efficiencies, the C-Suite enjoys the higher ROI and the workers on the floor enjoy a safer, more productive production line. Our digital factory technology helps with equipment and machine maintenance, makes workers more productive, and eliminates waste to improve a manufacturer’s overall bottom line.
At Worximity, we truly partner with our clients, so all of our products come with premier customer support. From day one, you will have a dedicated operational expert to help you reach your company KPIs—and achieve industry operational excellence.
Our Operational Excellence Specialist (OES) teams are there for you during implementation and adoption of our Smart Factory technologies. Once you’re up and running, you’ll have access to a Worximity technical specialist who provides you with continuous improvement assistance so you can always reach your identified KPIs.