IIoT applications for process and quality control

Industry 4.0 aims to digitize aspects of the factory to improve process efficiency, quality control, and human bandwidth. In an era that is difficult to recruit and maintain talent, it’s important to bring in tools that enhance employee productivity and connect people to their work and each other. 

Tools that automate mundane tasks, including monitoring for safety concerns, can help with both talent retention and knowledge capture. These tools can help improve employee engagement and, in turn, profitability.

Here are four process and quality control applications that make optimizing and standardizing the manufacturing process easier, enabling you to reduce variability and avoid costly downtimes.

Live Report

Manufacturing companies have to manage multiple products, recipes, and production lines. It can be very demanding for your team and management to keep track of compliance standards for each product or recipe.

Ensuring all products comply with quality and safety standards is a top priority for shop floor managers and quality teams. However, manually tracking and monitoring operator compliance can be difficult. 

Self-serve applications can help operators comply with specific standards. For instance, Braincube’s Live App displays real-time production settings on the shop floor. By keeping operators in tune with the correct standards, companies can minimize the possibility of human error that impacts quality and safety standards. 

When a manufacturer sends new AI recommendations to the shop floor (via Braincube’s Live App), knowing if the shop floor follows those recommendations can be challenging for management. The Live Report App automates reports to help management drive production. These reports let management know if recommendations are followed and provide clarity around compliance and the expected results. 

Braincube’s Live Report App allows teams to go even further in their understanding of compliance. This app monitors all the compliance results from a specific period, including how often and how many of your products comply with specific production standards. You can export these automated reports to your other systems or share them with internal or external teams via email, permalinks, or QR codes. These automated reports give your teams greater visibility into what happened during production, enabling teams to improve future runs and scale successes globally. 

SPC Report

When measuring and maintaining quality during manufacturing production runs, Statistical Process Control (SPC) is the go-to standard in the industry. SPC gathers real-time data on production using statistical methods and sampling programs to help plant and operations managers manage their manufacturing processes.

The main objective of SPC is to enhance operations by identifying problems and reducing waste. It also allows teams to identify and fix issues before they become more significant. When teams need to calculate SPC, they must tediously collect data and manually compute whether points are out of limits. These calculations take significant time, which does not give teams adequate time to react and make changes.

Braincube’s SPC Report App automates SPC tracking and alerts users when production drifts out of control limits. Access to live SPC statistics enables teams to track SPC in real-time and monitor process variables that affect product output. With accurate near-real-time information, teams can more effectively manage their processes. 

This app also helps teams save valuable time by automating the creation of SPC reports. The SPC Reports App identifies and helps you eliminate causes of variation, making it possible to improve manufacturing operations. Not only do these reports maximize the understanding of the production process, but they also save teams countless hours of complex calculations.

One of Braincube’s mines and metals customers had trouble accessing various data formats and lost many hours doing complex and tedious calculations. After centralizing their data within the Cloud, the company’s managers, quality teams, and engineers use the SPC Report App to monitor and report SPC automatically. In turn, teams could more easily identify root causes, enabling them to reduce downtime, equipment failure, and production errors. 

Control Charts

Control charts are an SPC method designed to analyze process performance by plotting data characteristics within upper and lower control limits with a defined center line. While valuable, control charts are also time-consuming to build and maintain. Collecting the right data is often a time-consuming manual process. Given how long it takes to calculate SPC, the shop floor often doesn’t have the time to react and make changes promptly. Without the Control Charts App, manufacturers may not realize a problem exists until the end of production.  

For example, if quality starts dropping during production, your teams should be alerted immediately rather than finding out when the products are finished. Waiting until they are finished leaves you with disqualified products made with wasted materials and several other manufacturing costs. Without real-time control charts, your organization plays a quality guessing game until it’s too late to resolve an issue. 

The Braincube Control Charts App allows you to monitor production conditions in real-time, making it easy to keep track of SPC statistics during production. Monitoring multiple data points (including min, max, Cp, Cpk, variance, and normality) makes it possible for teams to react quickly as soon as drifts occur. These kinds of real-time insights help teams avoid unexpected downtimes. In turn, you can reduce variability, increase productivity, and lower production costs. 

Production Standards

Today’s market is highly competitive, and consumers demand quality products. Achieving consistent quality is crucial for today’s manufacturers. Not only are companies striving to deliver flawless products, but they’re also trying to minimize waste, financial costs, and labor hours.

Using Braincube’s Production Standard App, you can easily set and maintain production standards for all product lines. This app improves efficiency by centralizing and managing all your production standards within the Braincube IIoT Platform, making it easy for teams to access the correct production standards for any and all products. 

Aubert & Duval, a metals manufacturer specializing in aeronautics products, wanted to improve their operator compliance and product quality. The company leveraged Braincube’s IIoT technologies to analyze its historical data to determine the correct parameters and share these updated standards with operators on the shop floor. 

By using Braincube’s Production Standards App to store and access each product’s specific settings, Aubert & Duval’s operators can adhere to standards and reduce variability in production lines. The app helps operators remember the specific settings for each machine without difficulty, especially when producing a variety of products. Implementing these tools and new processes resulted in an 18% decrease in defects and a 32% increase in process stability.

Implementing tools like Braincube’s Production Standards App and new processes resulted in an 18% decrease in defects and a 32% increase in process stability for Aubert & Duval’s production lines.

Conclusion

In manufacturing, quality control is a process that ensures customers receive products free from defects that meet their needs. If not done correctly, finished products can put consumers at risk. Ensuring that products meet the required specifications during production involves inspecting and measuring products to maintain overall quality standards. 

Managing production data and ensuring quality across various systems and formats can be time-consuming for teams and hinder their ability to keep production running smoothly. Braincube’s Process and Quality Control app package will digitize and centralize your production data and standards.