Life Cycle Implementation Delivers Payback by the Bucketful

With a product line consisting of buckets of various sizes, shapes and colors for use in industrial environments as well as retail packaging, Ropak is one of the largest manufacturers of industrial containers in the U.S. The company 's La Mirada, Calif., facility has 50,000 sq. ft. of production space with a 100,000-sq.-ft. warehouse. At this location there are 12 injection molding machines and one blow molding machine. Most of the product moves from these machines through a hot stamp process and onto operator stations where workers do some assembly, visually inspect and stack the product for palletizing.

Jerry Roteman, Ropak's U.S. project manager, said the company wanted to implement an automated sortation system to "eliminate confusion in delivering products to operators, improve their efficiencies and cut down on the hazards associated with forklifts moving between the machines."

To achieve these goals, Ropak hired Advanced Industrial Systems Inc., a systems integrator of industrial automation. AISystems subscribes to a formalized implementation, or "life cycle," methodology to ensure that the installed system yields the desired results. In essence, the life cycle may be summed up by the old adage, "Measure twice, cut once." Depending on the size of the project, however, some steps of the process may be abbreviated and somewhat transparent to the customer.

The life cycle methodology suggests that a detailed requirements/top-level system design step be broken out as a first phase before moving on to implementation. In this first phase, detailed requirements are defined and prioritized, while system design is held strictly accountable to the requirements documentation. Iteration between the requirements and design becomes the procedure which results in identifying the lowest cost solution to meet the real business need. If the project is identified as going over budget during design, the requirements are then revisited.

Requirements ranked as lowest priority are those first examined for elimination. Control then passes back to design, which must mirror each requirement. Though this process may add a few weeks to the project, it ensures the highest return on investment, since each dollar spent in implementation may then be attributed to a clearly defined requirement.

After this "requirements" phase rendered a Functional Requirements Document (FRD), the Ropak project then moved onto the "implementation" phase. This second phase consisted of detailed design, implementation, testing, documentation, startup and training.

Gene Kaplan, AISystems' president says, "I feel the role of an integrator has changed. There are now tools that enable us to develop systems without the preponderance of low-level source code necessary just a few years ago."

AISystems selected a number of these "tools" to develop Solution Soft, which contains pre-engineered sortation control logic, screen templates, device connectivity and coordinates various other aspects of the system. A technique enabled through the use of these types of tools is screen prototying. AISystems uses Wonderware's In-Touch software to design the workstation screens used for viewing and controlling the sortation line. Screens that are reviewed and changed are then able to be integrated into the system during implementation.

One of the primary benefits of this system is that existing screen templates and pre-established data flows are configured, thus requiring no tampering with compiled source code and enabling quicker implementation. The open platform design also makes the system easier to maintain, and modifications may be made without proprietary concerns. Phased implementation or integration with other related applications is easier to coordinate. Systems implemented in this way also tend to be less costly to develop.

Adhering to the implementation phase of the life cycle, the Ropak job was staged complete at the AISystems' facility prior to installation. This allowed the system to be proven before going live. According to Ken Sultany, AISystems project engineer, "Staging the job before installation played a significant role in our achieving a five-day start up, including training and set point tuning."

The resulting system coordinates the movement of buckets from the initial molding process, assembly and inspection until they are finally palletized.

Roteman feels that the project has been a success. "The system has increased production by 15 percent, decreased labor by 25 percent and realized an 18-month payback." He continues, "There has been some increase in product quality that is difficult to quantify." The production area is also much less cluttered since the system has been installed and is generally a safer place to work. Regarding the reliability of the system, he explains that "Apart from the human element, like employees manually triggering photo eyes to give a certain lane priority, the system is about as foolproof as you can get."

The system has been in operation since November 1995. The La Mirada facility is the most automated of all Ropak locations, and the company is now planning on implementing the same system in its Texas facility.

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GEIGER Technic Minimizes Waste, Cuts Report Times

GEIGER Technic Inc. of Kalamazoo, Mich., is an injection molder that manufactures plastic coolant reservoirs for the automotive industry. In the company's production environment, one of the critical business issues it faces is minimizing plastic scrap. Customer quotes are based on minimal scrap, and any waste must be incorporated into GEIGER Technic's overhead costs.

"We needed a simple scrap report, and until recently, we couldn't get the information we were looking for from our system," said Jon Little, GEIGER Technic's system administrator. "Unless we printed 40 pieces of paper and poured over each page for the data, we couldn't get this key piece of information."

GEIGER Technic did not have anyone with the programming depth -- or the time -- to pull the data the company needed from its existing system. "Data can hide in so many different tables, and finding it is not a simple task," Little said.

GEIGER Technic chose SytePower from Symix Computer Systems, Columbus, Ohio, to solve this business challenge. SytePower is a business intelligence software package that offers interactive reporting and analysis of enterprisewide Symix databases. SytePower's on-line analytical processing (OLAP) technology extracts and transforms Symix data into user-defined, multidimensional views/reports of business critical information.

"SytePower takes away the complex data schema and presents transactions in simple English terms -- like 'Accounts Payable' and 'Transactions Posted,' instead of a long string of strange characters like "aptrxp.ap-acct" -- so we can easily find the fields we need," said Little.

GEIGER Technic employees can now look at a scrap analysis report each morning at their daily production meeting and make it a standard part of how they do business. Instead of a pile of paper, employees can see up-to-the-minute data that is computed on the spot.

The report shows the company where the scrap problems exist, on what press and on what job number, where the restarts occur, and what was the cause. As a result, the company can immediately see whether the scrap came about for a valid cause, or whether it was a human error, and they can correct the problem quickly. At month's end, GEIGER technic can run a report on the whole month and see all the historical trends, with all the data fine-tuned to meet its needs.

Although GEIGER Technic has not yet figured out specific cost savings following the implementation of SytePower, Little estimates that his report running time has been cut by 50 percent.

"Most importantly, I've never had to touch a keyboard to get the reports I need," Little said. "Instead of writing a query in Progress, SytePower lets us look at the fields in simple English, with all the tables laid out."

Little also reports that implementation of the system went easily. "It was a very simple, straightforward implementation. It is similar to implementing a Microsoft Access database," he said. n

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Charles Machine Works Goes Paperless

The Charles Machine Works (CMW), Perry, Okla., manufacturer of Ditch Witch products used to dig open trenches and bore into the earth for power, sewer and cable lines, has relied on paper-based documents to communicate with its distributors and dealers since the company's inception more than 30 years ago. This meant sending distributors volumes of documents and constant updates on everything from technical information to service manuals to price books.

Not only was it expensive and unwieldy to print and send all this information, but it was difficult for distributors to file and find the appropriate data when they needed it. Dealers were getting stacks of paper from CMW several times per week, but often didn't get around to filing it right away. As a result, distributors were often unable to locate a specific piece of information for a customer. At that point, many of them would contact CMW for duplicate copies.

After a brief trial with microfiche to solve this problem, operations manager Rich Haynes looked into CD-ROM solutions. Haynes chose Dataware Technologies, Cambridge, Mass., to partner in CMW's efforts to move away from a paper-based documentation system.

The project began with nearly one- quarter of the text from CMW's manuals, parts catalogs, technical bulletin and safety notices still remaining on paper. The remainder was in ASCII files. The process of conversion from text to CD-ROM took a few months and approximately 25 employees (not all of which worked full time) using image scanning and text input.

CMW named its CD-ROM-based information system ProLink I. It provides a number of ways to search for information, including model name or number, part descriptions or numbers, or even key words or phrases. This is achieved through extensive cross links and indexes. ProLink also has the ability to: print parts order lists, illustrations or screen images; and when linked to dealers' business management systems, check dealer inventories or order parts directly. The disc is being distributed to CMW's dealers worldwide, with interfaces available in English, Spanish, German, French and Italian. Updated discs will be distributed every few months.

ProLink was built using Dataware's CD Author, which features menu-driven programs to guide the user through the development process. The product's open architecture allows its CD-ROMs to run on Windows, DOS, Macintosh and UNIX platforms.

Lynn Fent, ProLink Group Leader at CMW, spoke of the process of putting the CD-ROM together. "Using CD Author, the user can choose to be walked through the entire series of steps, with menus in each step giving the choices to be made and actions to be taken. There is no need to know complex commands or programming languages to be able to author. But even more importantly, CD Author provides a depth of functionality that allows a person who wants to create a more complex database to do so, by going deeper into the levels of menu selections. In other words, while CD Author is very easy to use in a basic manner, the ease-of-use does not imply that there is not a deeper set of capabilities that can be accessed for higher-end applications."

Information on the ProLink CD-ROM includes: equipment parts manual illustrations and bill of materials, technical and service bulletins, product improvement and safety notifications, and CMW dealer list parts prices.

"ProLink makes the management of our technical service information so much simpler, while greatly enhancing our dealers' quality of customer support," says Haynes. "It replaces the need for our dealers to search out certain manuals, cross-check against a technical bulletin, search through microfiche, or even have to call the factory. For our dealers, who need answers to customers' questions immediately, the ProLink solution is a strategic improvement. The application also reduces costs significantly for both dealers and CMW, including the staff required to handle individual inquiries or requests."

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