Aspect Productivity Technology explains how it is helping its clients achieve greater sustainability, through smart technology.
Sustainability is about meeting the needs of today, without adversely impacting on the needs of tomorrow. Sustainability in discrete manufacturing is achieved with new or improved technologies alongside sustainable business philosophies and models.
Achieving greater sustainability is also not just about production efficiencies, minimising waste and maximising resources. A well-run digital manufacturing floor helps manufacturers become more sustainable by enabling faster access to better quality information for informed decision making.
Bonson Packaging’s Sustainability Philosophy
Sustainability is an important goal at Bonson Packaging in Auckland. They support a circular economy and recyclable, bio-degradable and compostable products.
The company promotes a reduce, reuse, recycle and recover philosophy and applies these practices to its operations.
An example of this is Bonson using data from the AspectPL MES software to monitor the power usage of their machines. Machine output might be the same but power usage can fluctuate. Data from AspectPL helps Bonson to reduce their electricity costs and carbon footprint.
According to Bonson, the data supplied by AspectPL has helped reduce machine power use by 5% – giving their products a smaller carbon footprint.
Cromford Pipe machine utilisation
Luke Sutherland from Australian manufacturer Cromford Pipe tells us how they have improved their machine utilisation or Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) by having easy access to manufacturing data.
‘’Previously calculating OEE was a significant task. It took a week and a half to download and analyse a month’s production – now with AspectPL it takes 20 seconds. Because analysing OEE was so difficult, it wasn’t our focus – we operated at about 50% which was very poor. Now it’s easy to calculate, we constantly review it and our OEE is between 70 and 80%. This means we are producing more product, to plan, with less resource. AspectPL MES software has been an absolutely huge positive change for our business.’’
Proficiency allows time for efficiency, reducing downtime and waste
Cormack Packaging has saved so many man hours since they implemented an MES, it now has time to concentrate on optimising production.
“Previously our planning information wasn’t totally accurate. We’d count boxes off the machine. The machine makes the product, we pack boxes, we count the number of boxes made. With AspectPL we have full visibility and real time reporting on what’s actually happening. You can easily move jobs from machine to machine and look at ‘what if’ scenarios. The AspectPL scheduler has also saved us 2 days per month planning 250 work orders”, says Production Manager Shaun Wallace.
“Now I can work with the guys on the factory floor to optimize production. Currently we are working on making our changeovers faster, improving our line start and line clearance downtimes and reducing waste. With AspectPL we can see these stats at the push of a button – and in real time.’’
Monitoring and measuring manufacturing processes not only reduces waste and improves productivity. It also helps businesses pursue sustainability through better quality information that supports long term business viability.
