Application Briefs

AMP modernizes to achieve total customer satisfaction
AMP's Shrewsbury Molding Facility is a captive molding supplier that distributes thermoplastic and thermoset connector housings to AMP business units. Beginning with a commitment to modernize its molding capabilities at the Shrewsbury, Pa., facility, AMP started with a clean slate and moved to a refurbished building with new equipment.

The main element of this modernization was a communications link called the PlantView System. In an effort to achieve total customer satisfaction, the team's strategic goal was to improve product quality, product delivery and service, operational cost effectiveness, and supplier management. PlantView applications run on personal computers connected to a local area network (LAN), which interconnects all areas of the plant, including administration, engineering, tool shop and production.

"An important feature is the system's ability to change," said AMP plant manager Joel Dubs. He pointed out that as new opportunities occur, the system can be modified accordingly.

The most difficult challenge was integrating the system so it would be useful at all levels of the organization. A key program element was a cross-functional team that provided input from all levels. In the final stages, all data gathering was automated, including automatic feedback for analysis of various production factors. Production is automatically logged and can be monitored throughout the factory. Detailed production knowledge means that managers have advanced information on slowdowns or machine failures, and can take corrective actions.

At AUTOFACT '94, AMP's PlantView was named the winner of the LEAD (Leadership and Excellence in the Application and Development of integrated manufacturing) Award. Siemens Automotive's shop floor information system was named runner-up.

Ingersoll implements integrated project management system
Ingersoll Milling Machines Co. (Rockford, Ill.) has developed an integrated project management (IPM) system that schedules and reports on the activities that need to be completed to successfully install each customer's order. The IPM system allows a customer to directly access on-line information on the progress and status of their order. As a result, the system has helped establish a "virtual company" within Ingersoll, according to George J. Hess, the company's vice president, planning.

"In our optimized system, we are shifting our focus to the effective use of knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge, the recording and classification of knowledge, and to the disbursement of it to critical points throughout our entire enterprise and our customers," Hess explained. To accomplish this, Ingersoll is using expert system technology to design the next generation of sub-systems.

Expert systems, briefly, also known as knowledge-based systems, embody the expertise of one or more domain specialists and solve problems by mimicking the decision-making abilities of a human expert. The system can then be utilized by lesser qualified users to provide support for decisions.

Ingersoll developed an expert system for a concurrent engineering application. It supports an automatic tool path generator system to do automatic numeric control (N/C) part programming. "Our goals were to implement a system that captures the methods, tooling, fixturing and tool path generation logic that our best expert N/C part programmers use in programming a part," Hess said.

How did the expert system do? According to Hess, the task of tool path generation was reduced from 30 hours to 30 minutes, for a 60:1 productivity gain. "The consistently high quality of the N/C programs make it even more valuable," he noted.

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