Business Case 5
Sidhean Teo is a small to mediums size manufacturing enterprise that is located in the rural region in the West of Ireland. Sidhean Teo was established in the year 2000 as an independent company to take over the fire engine business that had been operating out of there since 1984. They currently are in the business of manufacturing and fabricating fire engines for local authorities. The company also has a large upgrading and repair unit for second hand fire engines. The key processes in Sidhean Teo include sheet metal facilities in terms of CNC punching, Folding, Cutting, MIG and TIG welding, Spot welding etc. and they also carry out sub-contract manufacturing and assembly work in these areas.
The objective of this business case is to optimise specifically the following aspects in its business processes:
- Improve quality of information, required for process scheduling by the operations.
- Increase the level of efficiency and effectiveness.
- Reduce the overall lead time to manufacture the produce.
- Reduce the overall stock outs.
To realise the optimisation it needs to analyse processes in Sidhean Teo and implement improvements. The process does not offer a high level of standardisation as each customer can customise the product and is highly involved throughout the entire product development process. The overall scheduling process and order handling process on the shop floor is driven by the initial schedule. The schedule should contain real time information regarding the materials and the human personnel roles and positions for the manufacturing and assembly of the work on the shop floor. This schedule drives the production execution on the shop floor and after the product is made at the different stages the schedule is updated according to work status etc. The product is then tested and after successful functional and parts testing the customer is involved in the process where changes may need to incur. Again after each of these stages the schedule should be updated and the shop floor activities should be modified as appropriate. Parts and products leave the shop floor after final testing to the customer and materials, labour availability etc. should be updated on the schedule. A summary of this process is shown in the following figure.
The key solution features envisaged in the business case at Sidhean Teo are as follows:
- RFID - Radio Frequency tags will be needed to identify the people who are working on the shop floor as well as recording their skill sets etc. Also the different components and jobs will need to be identified and the various location of each part
- SRS - A speech recognition system can be placed in the stores to capture any instructions for the effective real time recording of stock taking and can be used to update the database and stock records. However this may not work with regard to the manufacturing noise.
- Mulit-modal services - This will allow the wireless connection to and from the information databases that exist on the shop floor to enable the effective decision making from various locations throughout the plant.