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CASE STUDY | Machine Shop Increases Productivity By 69% In One Year

Learn How FreePoint’s ShiftWorx™ MES Successfully Helped a Machine Shop Save $325/day by Increasing Productivity 69% in One Year!

The customer is a modern machine shop located in the border region in Mexico. The shop has 4 Electrical Discharge Machines (EDM) that are critical to the company’s production.  The following figures demonstrate the impact of ShiftWorx™ MES solution.

The image below (the before scenario) shows pertinent productivity information from these 4 machines from a typical day before the integration.  The blue bars illustrate the EDM machines’ run times for a 24 hour period and the white gaps indicate the setup time between each run.  Both the run (blue bar) and set-up times (white bar) vary depending on the job.  The shop, in the before scenario, required 24 hours of scheduled production time to produce a total of 43.5 hours of “value adding” activity using the 4 machines on that day.

 

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The screenshot below illustrates the exact same 4 EDM machines shown one year later.  Similar to the previous scenario, the blue bars still vary in accordance with the jobs being run on each machine, however, the setup times (the white gaps between the blue bars) are now consistently smaller than the before snapshot.  The result from integrating ShiftWorx™ MES is that less time is being lost between productive “value adding” periods.  For the customer, this means that more value adding activity (specifically 57 hours on this day) occurred in less scheduled production time (two 8.5 hour shifts vs. three 8 hour shifts).  All of the recovered lost machine time was then aggregated, and the machines were freed up for an entire shift.  Not only does this decrease production cost for parts being produced, but it increases the plant’s capacity and ability to take on more work.

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The image below compares the productivity before in one month, to the same month one year later.  As illustrated in the graph, every day of the month before had machine activity, meaning that employees were in the shop running the machines.  The year after, the machine activity occurred only on weekdays, freeing up most weekend shifts as well.  This allowed the customer to increase their capacity and take on more business.  The machine’s efficiency went up from 33% on a typical 24 hour day the year previous, to 56% on a typical 17 hour day 12 months later representing an increase of 69%!

 

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At that rate of productivity improvement, the system as implemented paid for itself in 20 days, and the cost of the ShiftWorx™ MES SaaS subscription is recovered in the first day of every month.  It’s hard to beat that kind of ROI!

For More Information on How ShiftWorx™ MES SaaS Can Benefit Your Manufacturing Operation, Please Contact Us to Schedule Your Consultation and Live Demo Specific to Your Industry!

#MetalFabrication #JobShop #SmartManufacturing #Industry40 #MachineMonitoringSystem #IIoT #ManufacturingExecutionSystem #MESsystem #ContinuousImprovement #ManufacturingAutomation #DowntimeTracking #OEE #LeanManufacturing

 

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