Technology Consulting for Manufacturing: Choose a System That Solves the Right Problem

Technology consulting is designed to help a manufacturing company determine what problem the technology should solve, what data will be required, and where to begin the implementation. The analysis results in a detailed project scope, a list of requirements, a sequence of activities, and a method for evaluating the results.

For a company in the automotive industry, this also means the ability to verify traceability, process parameters, customer requirements, and the plant’s capacity to fulfill orders on time.

By definition, technology consulting involves analyzing a company’s processes, data, infrastructure, and objectives, which leads to the development of a plan for technological changes.

The consultant’s job is to assess how production is proceeding, identify where employees are performing unnecessary manual tasks, determine which information is reliable, and ascertain the needs of the production, quality, maintenance, and IT departments.

This analysis should help you determine:

The starting point is a specific production need, not the name of the system or a list of available modules.

After conducting an analysis, a company may decide to implement an MES, APS, SCADA, or traceability system. Sometimes it’s enough to integrate existing applications, standardize reporting, or automatically retrieve data from several machines.

Naming the system will not help define and specify the project’s goal. A much more useful way to define the requirement would be:

We want to automatically record order completion, the number of good units, scrap, cycle time, and the causes of downtime for each line.

Based on this, you can determine:

Vendors then provide quotes for the same scope, and the company can compare offers based on features, integration costs, and maintenance terms, rather than comparing presentations with completely different content.

Consulting also helps clarify the needs of each department. Each department views the same process from a different perspective. Production needs up-to-date information on plan execution; Quality must be able to quickly retrieve batch history and inspection results; Maintenance looks for sources of downtime; and IT monitors communication with machines, data access, and system uptime.

These requirements must be met within a single project, without burdening the operator with tasks that slow down the work.

An analysis is most justified prior to an investment whose scope has not yet been precisely defined.

It’s a good idea to do this when:

The general consensus is that the company needs to make a costly decision, but there is not yet a single, agreed-upon description of its needs.

One of the first considerations is the rate at which the company must produce the product in order to keep up with demand and fulfill customer orders on time.

The customer’s attitude helps with this:

Takt = available production time / customer demand

If a production line has 420 minutes of available time per shift and the plan calls for producing 210 units, the takt time is 2 minutes per unit. This pace corresponds to a demand of, on average, one finished product every 120 seconds. The Lean Enterprise Institute defines a takt time as available production time divided by customer demand. Takt time and cycle time describe different things.

The takt time is determined by demand, while the cycle time indicates how long it actually takes to produce a product or complete an operation. When a process takes 135 seconds but the takt time is 120 seconds, it will not be able to keep up with the schedule without changing the work organization, increasing availability, or removing the bottleneck.

In this context, it is necessary to take into account changeovers, downtime, shortages, corrections, and the availability of workers and materials. The throughput of the entire production line is determined by the stage with the lowest production capacity.

The system can detect a deviation almost immediately, but it won’t explain the cause if the stops are misclassified and the piece count also includes shortages.

Technology consulting , therefore , combines production calculations with the question of what data needs to be collected so that an employee can make the right decision.

The analysis begins on the shop floor, because that is where you can see how the operator initiates a job, where they retrieve the instructions, when they record the result, and what they do when a deviation is detected.

The advisor describes the order’s journey from planning to settlement. Among other things, they review material flow, quality control, the handling of corrections, and the rules for closing out production.

It is also necessary to establish responsibility for the data. Who approves changes to the formula, determines the cause of a shutdown, or can correct an error in the record?

Without these principles, even a well-designed system will begin to accumulate incomplete information.

An ERP system typically stores data on orders, materials, and batches, while machines record process parameters. An MES can link this data to a work order, a shift, and an operator, whereas spreadsheets often serve as a log for information that no application supports.

Each required parameter must specify its source, owner, and the decision it is intended to support. However, collecting everything for future use increases the cost of infrastructure, maintenance, and analysis; therefore, a better criterion is the data’s usefulness for production, quality, or service.

Older machines do not always have a ready-made interface. Data can sometimes be retrieved from the controller, the device’s database, or an additional sensor, and each of these methods has a different cost and level of reliability.

The industrial network, communication protocols, servers, backups, and permissions also need to be checked. It is extremely important that the system continues to function after a connection loss.

The license price is only part of the budget, as integrations and setting up the machines for communication can account for a significant portion of the cost.

The system should support day-to-day operations at every level. An operator should be able to complete a task quickly without unnecessary clicks; a shift manager should be able to immediately check the status of the plan; a process engineer should be able to analyze the process flow; and the quality department should be able to easily trace the product’s history.

The requirements should specify who makes a given decision, based on what information, and how much time they have to do so.

In the automotive industry, data often needs to link a product to a material, a machine, a tool, a program, an inspection result, and the time the operation was performed.

The scope depends on the product and the customer’s requirements and may include:

Full traceability does not yet clarify what the system is supposed to track. First, it is necessary to determine the level of identification, the scope of the information to be stored, and the data retention period.

These decisions affect the labeling process, the number of scans performed by the operator, the system architecture, and the database capacity.

Simply recording lot numbers does not guarantee precise traceability.

This is well illustrated by the dilution rate, or batch dispersion factor. The term appeared in Groupe PSA’s supplier requirements published in 2021. The document required that the traceability system include a precise calculation of this coefficient and also cover lower-tier suppliers. We treat this as a historical, documented example of requirements used in the automotive industry, rather than a current obligation for all Stellantis suppliers.

Let’s assume that a single batch of components is distributed among several containers and is used simultaneously on two production lines. The system records the receipt of the material but does not link it to specific products.

After detecting the nonconformity, the company knows the period during which the batch was used, but is unable to identify only those products that contain the suspect component.

The shutdown then affects a much larger number of products. Sorting, inspection, and downtime costs increase, even though the defect may affect only a small portion of production.

The weaker the link between the material and the finished product, the broader the range of actions to be taken upon detection of a nonconformity.

In such a case, the advisor should check the following:

Tracking every individual item isn’t always justified. The level of detail should be based on the product’s risk, customer expectations, and the cost of a potential complaint.

This example illustrates why purchasing a traceability application does not solve the problem, since you must first identify the tracking points and determine the material flow.

An automotive components manufacturer with several hundred employees used an ERP system and numerous local applications assigned to specific machines or production lines.

The systems handled orders, data, and reporting in different ways. Employees who changed positions had to learn new interfaces. Some processes still relied on paper and manual tasks.

The company drafted preliminary requirements for the MES. During a workshop attended by representatives from production, quality, maintenance, and IT, it became clear that the list was too general. It did not specify data sources, operational standards, or the scope of integration. Instead of beginning the implementation, the plant conducted a more comprehensive pre-implementation analysis.

A requirements document and a plan for the next steps were developed, enabling the company to provide contractors with a common set of specifications and receive comparable bids.

The most important decision was made before purchasing the system, because the plant was able to determine which processes needed to be standardized, what data was required, and under what conditions it would accept the solution.

Representatives from production, quality control, maintenance, logistics, and IT should participate in the work. Details should be coordinated with the people who perform the tasks being analyzed on a daily basis.

Consulting services at Explitia include, among other things, an analysis of the current state, a requirements document, and a roadmap of implementation phases. This documentation can later be used to solicit bids from various contractors.

You’ll need materials that will help you make a decision and monitor the implementation:

Metrics should be based on the project’s objective. These may include the time required to prepare a report, the completeness of the product history, the response time to downtime, the proportion of automatically collected data, or the extent to which the project is on track with the plan.

If the material only provides general recommendations, you’ll still have to translate them into a request for proposal on your own.

Before entering into a partnership, make sure that:

Recommending a specific system after just one brief meeting requires caution. Without reviewing the process, equipment, and data, a significant portion of the proposal will be based on assumptions.

Before your meeting with the counselor, answer the following questions together:

The different responses provided by each department are important information. Before selecting a technology, you must agree on objectives, definitions, and responsibilities.

Technology will provide useful information only if you specify the data sources, the rules for recording the data, and how it will be used.

A preliminary analysis of the process, production pace, and infrastructure reduces the number of assumptions carried over into the contract. It also minimizes the risk that fundamental requirements will not be identified until the configuration or testing phases.

The more important decisions are made before selecting a contractor, the easier it is to control the cost, timeline, and outcome of the implementation.

Technology consulting involves analyzing a company’s processes, data, infrastructure, and objectives. It results in a plan for change and requirements for systems, integration, or work organization.

An audit assesses the current status based on established criteria. Consulting services also include preparing changes, priorities, specifications, and project acceptance criteria.

No. The analysis may reveal a need to integrate existing applications, organize data, change a process, or expand the current solution.

It covers process analysis, traceability, production parameters, quality, customer requirements, systems integration, and the plant’s capacity to fulfill orders.

A company planning to implement an MES can first review data sources, order processing procedures, and the recording of shortages, downtime, and inspection results. Based on this, a common specification for suppliers is developed.

The takt time determines how often a product should be produced so that the company can meet customer demand within the available time. It is not the same as the actual cycle time of an operation.