OEE Triples in 12 Months — From 20% to 58%
From paper records to real-time production intelligence
This aluminum extrusion facility supplies industrial customers in metals processing. Raw material is a large share of the cost of every part, and quality has to stand up to customer audits. The plant runs multiple production lines across shifts and was working to cut scrap and improve yield. It needed a real-time production system that could connect to the equipment already on the floor.
10in6 came in as part of a plant-wide modernization with two goals: cut costly metal waste to near zero, and give management and engineering the data to make decisions faster. It was deployed across multiple production lines with full PLC integration and no equipment replacement.
Improve efficiency and reduce raw material waste
Before 10in6, production management and the quality team had no reliable real-time data. All reporting was manual, decisions were reactive, and the cost of scrap was hard to measure, let alone control.
Production & Efficiency
- No historical performance data for management or improvement staff
- No factual basis for prioritizing where to focus limited engineering resources
- Production issues discovered a shift or more after they occurred
- Improvement projects picked on instinct
- Aggressive goal to reduce costly metal waste to 0%
Quality & Compliance
- All quality checks performed on paper with no searchable history
- No real-time alerting when process variables drifted out of spec
- Customer audits were stressful because questions about trends couldn't be answered
- No way to flag specific billets at risk from process data
- Traceability relied on manual records that were incomplete and hard to find
10in6 modules deployed
The plant deployed several 10in6 modules together, covering production efficiency and quality management. Data flows automatically into SQL Server with no manual entry, and operators, engineers and management can see it as soon as it lands. The existing PLCs stayed as they were.
Production & Efficiency Reporting
- Automated shift, daily, and weekly production reports delivered by email
- Loss analysis by machine, shift, and part number
- Pareto charts automatically rank top downtime causes
- Improvement efforts focused on the highest-impact issues first
Scheduled Checks — Paperless Quality
- Eliminates paper check sheets across all production processes
- Automated alerting for missed checks and out-of-spec conditions
- Fully searchable quality history available in seconds
- Audit-ready data accessible to any authorized user at any time
SPC — Statistical Process Control
- Real-time tracking of density, dimensions, temperature, and pressure
- Automated control charts for all critical process variables
- Immediate alerting when results approach or breach spec limits
- Identifies specific billets at risk before scrap is produced
Real-Time Displays, Andon & Issues Tracker
- Live production status on shop-floor monitors, desktop, and mobile
- Real-time OEE and shift targets visible to operators at all times
- One-touch operator calls routed to Maintenance, Engineering, or Supervisor
- Long-term issues and resolutions tracked in a searchable knowledge base
The OEE trend — first 12 months with 10in6
OEE data from the customer's Press 4 area starts climbing right after go-live and settles well above 50%. OEE was 20% in April 2020, peaked at 60% in February 2021 and ended the first year at 58%, a 38-point improvement in 12 months.
- Real-time visibility into production pace, downtime, and quality issues across all lines and shifts
- Improvement projects chosen from ranked loss data
- Shift, daily and weekly production reports generated automatically
- Specific billets flagged for quality testing based on changing pressure and temperature trends
- Customer audit preparation reduced from days of file-searching to minutes of searchable history
- SPC alerting enables immediate process adjustments to prevent scrap before it occurs
Same presses, higher OEE
This is one of the largest OEE improvements in 10in6's customer history, and there was no large capital project behind it. The plant kept its presses and PLCs. The gains came from seeing losses during the shift, ranking them, and working on the largest ones first.
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