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CASE STUDY – Aerospace Manufacturer Increases Resiliency to Risk and Disruption
VIMANA’s IoT Solutions for Smart Manufacturing:
Asset Performance Management, Predictive Maintenance, Workforce Performance and Productivity.
Company Background
This Aerospace and Defense manufacturer is a single-source provider of production and automated assembly systems. They have five manufacturing plants in the US and Mexico and produce both mold and assembly tooling. Their mission is to deliver innovative, safe, and reliable aerospace manufacturing products and solutions while remaining competitive and profitable.
Challenge
For many aerospace manufacturers, volatile market demand and increased disruption have brought risk plant profitability. This manufacturer realized they needed real-time insight into asset performance, workforce productivity, and part production to thrive. They needed information about where to reduce costs, improve processes, and dynamically right-size operations.
Solution
VIMANA’s Analytics Delivers Insight to Optimize Assets and Workforce Productivity
VIMANA’s Smart Manufacturing Analytics Application provided real-time data, advanced analytics, and customizable dashboards and reporting capabilities to monitor and improve their workforce productivity and manufacturing flexibility. VIMANA provided the Aerospace and Defense Manufacturer:
- Data visualizations aligned to their business requirements and in a format their people understood.
- Real-time critical asset utilization and downtime monitoring guided immediate productivity gains and the creation of production targets.
- Condition monitoring and anomaly detection of failure conditions and asset alarms generated early warnings to manage asset maintenance proactively.
- Workforce performance reporting and shift comparisons drove behavior that contributed to their business objectives, identified low performing shifts, and provided insight into optimizing shift scheduling to reflect demand.
- Lights out analysis delivered real-time insight into unstaffed production performance during breaks, evenings, and weekends to optimize labor costs.
- Visibility into the actual machining time per job, defined by spindle hours, provided insight into delivery times and total manufacturing costs. They calculated variable overhead expenses such as tooling, coolant, and other consumables based on actual machining time.
Business Outcomes
With VIMANA, this Aerospace Manufacturer saw results immediately. Asset performance increased, downtime reduced, and workforce resources were aligned to meet changes in customer demand. This manufacturer:
- Improved asset performance by 33% in 3 weeks, increasing their return on capital equipment.
- Reduced their unplanned downtime by 40%, with proactive machine alerts and reduction in ‘wait time’ for welders, cutters, and programming.
- Improved planned downtime by 30% with a reduction in unnecessary preventative maintenance and extended set-up time.
- Decreased staffing by 25% and balanced resources to meet demand and enable safe distancing. The data-driven insight enabled intelligent scheduling and coordination across sites to ensure on-time delivery.
- Targeted and managed 25% lights-out machining to increase workforce efficiency using real-time dashboards.
- Improved their understanding of actual manufacturing costs, which positively affected profits and competitive quotes.
