Audit-Ready Quality and a 12-Year Partnership Across Nine Plants
From replacing a downtime system to running nine plants
This Tier One supplier makes automotive safety components for major OEM customers, and those customers audit its quality history.
The relationship with 10in6 started when the supplier replaced an existing application for monitoring equipment and downtime at four plants. That system carried costly annual support fees and offered limited capabilities. 10in6 offered more that the customer could grow into, at a lower cost than systems of similar breadth. Twelve years later it runs in nine plants, and the supplier picks up new 10in6 capabilities as they ship.
"Everything is such an improvement, it's hard to point to one thing. I no longer spend time checking that staff are doing their quality checks, so I can take the time to look at the results, find out where scrap is occurring and figure out why."
Costly tools, limited visibility, stressful audits
The incumbent monitoring system was expensive to keep and couldn't grow with the operation. Beyond replacing it, the supplier set three objectives for the partnership:
- Visibility into production efficiency by machine, die, part number, and shift
- Paperless quality to improve first-time quality (FTQ) and simplify customer audits
- Shorter ramp-up time for new lines and new plants
"Before 10in6 customer audits were nerve-racking. We weren't able to answer questions about quality trends or history. Now we are proud to show our system, the detailed history we have available and the positive quality trends we are achieving."
10in6 modules deployed
The deployment covers production reporting, paperless quality and issue tracking on one platform in all nine plants. It is extended as new lines come online.
Production & Efficiency Reporting
- Real-time alerts and plant displays with automated reports
- Efficiency analysis by machine, die, part number, and shift
- Constraint analysis to identify the true bottleneck
- Andon calls routed to the right support team
Paperless Quality
- Alerting for quality checks due and out-of-spec conditions
- Searchable history to confidently address customer audit requests
- Quality trends that can be shown to a customer on request
Issues Tracking
- Tracking and alerting for issues and corrective actions
- History of past problems and fixes across lines and plants
Mobile Views
- Whole-plant snapshot available anywhere, any time
- Cell-by-cell status for deciding where to send people
"We use the mobile views daily. It allows us to view the entire plant in a snapshot so we can monitor priority cells and shift resources accordingly."
Focused resources, easier audits, lower costs
- Reduced annual support costs while expanding functionality versus the replaced system
- Customer audit preparation reduced from days to minutes, with data pulled quickly to back up findings
- Focus on the right problems has reduced stress with key OEM customers
- Significant efficiency improvements on assembly lines
- Reduced PLC programming costs when adding new lines and plants
- Quality, Engineering, and Production working from the same trusted data
"10in6 helps us to cut through the noise to identify the real constraints. This allows us to focus our resources on the right issues. This has led to many improvements with a positive impact to OEE."
"Prior to 10in6 it was a challenge for us to quickly understand what our constraints were. The 10in6 reports have been very useful to point out those constraints and allow us to efficiently deploy our team to those areas."
Also in automotive: see how Stackpole International's water pump operation lifted first-time-through from 72% to 83% with paperless quality. Read the case study →
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