Kaga Factory, Panasonic Connect Co., Ltd.

Background

To receive accurate information about the increasingly outsourced production processes

Mr. Kadono, Plant Superintendent, says that the Kaga Factory increasingly outsources production, and sometimes, they do not receive any reports from contract companies unless a serious problem has occurred. It is often the case that they are not provided with any information about worksites. Under such circumstances, even if they wanted to improve production processes, it was difficult to know what to improve and how.

Reason for introduction

The welding process was not visualized with data, so we could not take any specific actions to bring about improvements

We introduced iWNB because we believed that the visualization of equipment data would enable us to identify the causes of variations, leading to reduced losses. We also believed that the visualization of welding robot errors and short production stoppages would help us reduce the average cycle time. (Mr. Teruta, Factory Management Section)

To promote our products to customers by using them at our factory

We also installed iWNB because we wanted to understand how customers can actually use the product at their factories to reap its benefits, by monitoring its performance at the Kaga Factory, which is not a large factory. We wanted to use the system's functions at our own factory and propose our use cases to our customers, including a maintenance information management function for a factories with many robots, and a traceability function for those that require traceability. (Mr. Teruta, Factory Management Section)

Benefits of introduction

Narrowing down problem locations has significantly increased the PDCA cycle speed

By checking the iWNB's error history, we can visualize which models had frequent errors and at what timing. Because we can narrow down the location of the cause of the problem, we have significantly increased the speed of the PDCA cycle for improvements. (Mr. Teruta, Factory Management Section)

Visualization with the on-site camera solution reduced the cycle time by 15%

The on-site camera solution uses fixed-point cameras to check the movement of workers at any given time. This camera solution enabled us to identify wasteful and uneven human movements and achieve a 15% reduction in cycle time by improving the movements. (Mr. Teruta, Factory Management Section)

Reduced workload of process managers and operators

Improving production itself is not difficult. Making continuous improvements is difficult. I believe that receiving information on welding robots through iWNB is helping us to reduce the workload of process managers. The camera solution is used for making improvements, not for placing workers under surveillance. Our contract companies understood that the solution would facilitate their work, and iWNB also improved communication with them. (Mr. Kadono, Plant Superintendent)

Future prospects