Manufacturing Optimization Software delivers computer-based tools for continuous improvement, non-linear optimization and production line simulation.
Optimization Software is a production line simulation software package that helps in optimizing factory performance by studying the manufacturing process. Optimization Software can help in finding the solution to various problems encountered during the production of a product by identifying bottlenecks and how they can be solved.
What is manufacturing optimization (and why should you care)?
Product design and manufacturing optimization is a messy business. Glues, screws, and the ever-shrinking PCB has made it harder and harder to build something remarkable that stays remarkable for more than one lifecycle.
Not only are products getting more complex, but the process to build them at scale is getting more complicated. COVID-19 has disrupted travel and supply chains the world over – yet the pressure to launch new products has only gotten higher. In fact, the only thing higher would be consumer expectations – which demand pure perfection in exchange for mercy in their reviews.
As electronics brands compete to grow – or even retain – their existing market share, they’ll need to reimagine the way they build if they want to be first to market with a new product.
And being first in line requires being the best on the line – and it starts with manufacturing optimization.
Manufacturing Optimization is a holistic discipline that enables manufacturers to get from proto to mass production and beyond as quickly as possible, with as little waste as possible. It’s a data-driven embrace of a better way – one that leverages emerging technology built on the powerful shoulders of math.
It’s also not new. Major hardware brands have always looked to optimize their build processes, typically in the form of large one-off consulting engagements. A brand might invite an expert team in to analyze their end-to-end product development and manufacturing processes and recommend a list of opportunities to improve, to be executed over months or years following the audit.
Today, with the expansion of IoT connectivity in factories and cloud platforms that provide data access and transformation, teams are increasingly able to take optimization into their own hands, driving continuous – rather than instantaneous – optimizations at the level of individual processes, whole factories, or even across a complex supply chain.
To put it less whimsically, manufacturing optimization means using data to go faster. Faster at finding defects, faster at validating solutions, and faster at maturing products. Faster where it counts.
“Manufacturing optimization is the practice of using data to build better products, faster, with the goal of being more competitive.”
Below we’ve broken down manufacturing optimization into three components: Product design optimization, ramp and MP optimization, and supply chain optimization.
Product design optimization
Product design optimization is a focused subset of optimization which takes into account the shape, size, component assembly, desired functionality, and consumer lifestyle of a market need in order to build the most effective device possible to meet the demand.
As manufacturers look to build new products to introduce to post-COVID market, designs will need to be smarter and processes more efficient to lower costs and reduce rework that may waste limited supply resources. They must also reach for unprecedented functionality to outpace competitors in their market and establish undeniable demand for the product.
This requires that engineers analyze their product design to assess if components are too close together or difficult to place facing the same direction, if placement of functional parts are too close batteries or overhangs, if component fragility is a potential problem, etc.
A product designer must predict the needs of the manufacturer so that both market needs and the manufacturing process are achievable. Their goal is to minimize operational time and cost, eliminate needless material that add weight, reinforce weak areas that may fail or cause issues in the field, and other design-specific defects. This can include deciding between glues and screws, whether or not to hand solder, or the size of your coax cables.
Here are a few new approaches to consider:
- Find more issues in EVT builds. If you focus on getting a full catalog of issues, you’ll realize that certain design features create clusters of similar issues that might be better resolved through a broader design change.
- Operate against the entire pareto. Most product teams are just scrambling to fix the obvious issues that happen. Those are often not the most critical or nefarious. Change your mindset to find every issue as early as possible. Putting more effort here (or deploying an optimization tool to do so) will save weeks by allocating resources to solve issues more efficiently.
- Focus on traceability. Make sure you have the right data ahead of time, it will save you time later.
Ramp and production optimization
Product design optimization occurs during the EVT and DVT part of the build process. As units are produced and failures occur in PVT and approaching ramp and MP, the hunt of process-specific defects begins – and can sometimes be the most costly piece of the puzzle.
This requires product data – photographic, functional test data, and any other proprietary components be tracked with the ability to segment in order to find correlations across lines, suppliers, field engineers, etc. Most teams currently use spreadsheets or other intelligence tools to aggregate and assess these data types, though the information is often siloed or localized making it hard to work cross-functionally.
Once this product data starts streaming in, it must also be shared virtually so that teams can collaborate more effectively no matter where they are. Visual inspections and defect analytics transcend language barriers and timezones, creating a more cooperative environment from brand to CM.
Here are a few new approaches to consider:
- Test for every known issue. Modern tools beat out antiquated AOI systems by making it easy for you to set up dozens of tests, even for very infrequent issues. As an operations lead in charge of ramp, you should expect 360˚ visibility into every issue so that you can choose to manage risk
- Nail down quality differences from different suppliers. Often parts come from different suppliers and may vary in quality or fabrication, and you don’t know if that causes issues until later. By adopting a data-forward approach, you can quickly correlate downstream issues to these types of differences.
- Improve remote collaboration. Modern tools like Instrumental capture photographic data by sku and can import functional test data and measurements in order to derive correlations with failures and returns. Links for specific units or groupings of units by defect type or failure can be shared remotely to any teammate for immediate action.
- Assess variable operator performance. How are people being trained? Are shifts too long? Are procedures too difficult to teach?
- Iterate across generations. Using a new manufacturing optimization platform that can aggregate data streams across builds can eliminate common problems altogether if certain learnings can be applied.
- Stabilize the assembly line environment. Are you keeping tracking of variable setups that may be impacting performance? Different types of jigs, tools, or lighting used to perform assembly steps can cause minute issues with larger impacts downstream.
- Discover unforeseen issues unrelated to the product. Some issues happen agnostic to the inner workings of the product. Shipping and packing may come to be an issue is assemblies are too long or if too many failures occur.
What is Production Optimization?
Production optimization is a collection of activities designed to increase productivity in the production system. It’s separate from process optimization, where the optimization effort is focused on making the finished product more efficient in its stages.
Production optimization uses models, analysis, prioritization, and measurements to increase productivity. This optimization includes equipment, staging areas, inventory protocols, facility layout, conveyance, and more.
Optimizing production is a tactic used in large footprint industries such as oil production and gas construction. But optimization can be used in most manufacturing operations for almost any production process to deliver greater value.
As IoT technology has matured, companies have discovered that information delivered from real-time data analysis allows them to understand the changing conditions and flow of the system and how it can be used to enhance productivity. Companies must use these insights to optimize production rates in the entire production process.
Examples of areas where insights can lead to production optimization and greater value include:
- Work in Process – Many companies focused on “process improvement” technology center their efforts entirely on the product itself. But work in process can impact productivity significantly. Too much inventory tied up for too long hurts cash flow and can create potential taxation issues. Due to multiple moves, it may also increase labor cost to move products from station to station unnecessarily.
- Workstation Auditing – As technology has made interactive dashboards and factory boards digital, the placement of these HMIs may need to be reconsidered. What made sense in a manual tracking environment may increase workloads or reduce effectiveness in a digital environment. HMIs, screens, monitors, and other devices are low profile and can be placed in a way that enhances productivity.
- Unnecessary Space – In manufacturing, dead space will often wind up as the home for WIP with no place to go. This means more handling and increasing operating costs.
- Bottlenecks – Bottlenecks can trigger work stoppage in upstream production processes. If factory monitoring platforms have begun maximizing the output of some workstations, managers may need to address a bottleneck that results from this upstream increase.
- Improved Inventory Communication – As real-time data highlights problems and prescribes solutions, technology will enable new protocols for warehousing and inventory to lead to increased production. Communication is key to the flow of materials in the new environment.
The journey to digitization and data-driven production includes the requirements to make changes to optimize production performance and lower costs. To take advantage of the technology available, some companies may realize the need to move machines or change the factory’s entire layout as the power of an IoT-driven production monitoring platform begins to deliver value.
The top downtime reasons are analyzed in the MachineMetrics Downtime pareto chart.
Product Content Optimization
Product Content Optimization can be defined as anything that enriches or improves the actual product attributes in a feed, to ensure you are exporting complete and high-quality content to your sales channels.
The online shopping industry has developed high standards when it comes to purchasing your products. No matter if you are selling via an Instagram Ad, a Google Shopping Product Listing Ad or a comparison site like PriceRunner – you need to always be providing accurate and up-to-date content.Ensuring you are competing effectively and making the most of your revenue potential means data needs to be clean, complete and as informative as possible.
Why is Product Content Optimization needed?
Different sales channels will be sent product listings from thousands of different online merchants. Many of these will only meet the basic feed requirements of the channel, and be unstructured, untidy, inconsistent and complicated.
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
Comma Separated Values (CSV)
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
Tab Separated Values (TSV)
As well as this, each one of these merchants will also send their information in a different way, in different formats (Google Spreadsheet, JSON, CSV, XML file).
Choosing not to optimize product content means retailers risk missing out on thousands of sales:Product listings not reaching the buyers they should due to lack of data feed informationDissatisfied shoppers not purchasing the product they think they are gettingGiving yourself further work later on – when products get rejected or don’t perform well.
Why can’t merchants just optimize product content themselves?
In some cases, it is possible to carry out manual optimization of product content without the need of a feed management tool. Some merchants use a Product Information Management (PIM) system to do this. Yet these systems don’t let you apply changes and alterations to hundreds or thousands of products at once. Therefore, a small 2-minute, optimization through a feed management tool like WakeupData could take hours and be extremely time-consuming on a manual, product-by-product basis!
The solution: importing and optimizing product content through a feed marketing tool
Using a product content integration and optimization software, you can merge together all vendor feeds, analyze the quality, structure and standardize the content, and submit it as a single, high-quality master feed to your PIM system.
Why use a feed marketing tool for Product Content Optimization?
Consistent multi-channel presence
We stated above how important it is to add consistency to your product content. If you are displaying one set of information in a Facebook ad and an entirely different set on your Google Shopping campaign or your own store, you are guaranteed to lose potential sales and quickly gain a bad reputation.
Ensuring you have a consistent presence with the same, regularly updated info being sent to all your sales channels is what feed marketing tools guarantee. You can be assured that the product content you are sending to customers is correct, complete and accurate – improving the overall shopping experience.
As well as this, you are moving beyond tools that offer simple integrations to shopping channels, you are improving and optimizing the product content, so it is not just being listed, it is performing effectively.
Time saving
Possibly the most significant aspect of using a feed marketing tool is the amount of time it saves digital marketers, PPC Managers, ecommerce merchants and online store owners.
Your data is dealt with by feed marketing experts who understand how to analyze the data content they are given. By identifying opportunities for cleaning, standardizing, enriching and optimizing your data – specific to the channels you want to sell on, they deliver a boost to online performance in a fraction of the time.
Enrich product content with additional info to give your business the vital edge:Integrate competitor pricing: The benefits of getting an overview of your competitors’ pricing are many. By merging the pricing info into your feed you can match specific products together based on their IDs. You can then adjust your own pricing and marketing strategies accordingly.
Integrate product ratings: Add extra factors that might be the difference between a customer making a purchase or not. Merging data that contains product’s ratings will boost the chances of shoppers clicking through to your product.Integrate recommendations: Using data from analytics tools like Clerk.io or Raptor Smart Advisor can help you identify best sellers and high performers from your online store and therefore divide and categorize your products more strategically.Integrate weatherdata: Adding the weather forecast for the next 7 days to your master feed means you can intelligently push weather-specific products at certain times and in certain regions.
Conclusion
Get more out of your production process. Whether you are a plant manager, COO, or a production line supervisor, get a new perspective with our powerful yet easy-to-use software. Zoom in to a part on the assembly line and simulate different scenarios. Assemble the perfect production line to avoid costly mistakes on the job and loss of money.