Lean Manufacturing in Action: One Heartbeat, Guided by a Smart Factory Digital Brain

In our interactions with multi-location global manufacturing enterprise customers and engagements in their operations, we hear the urgency of their need to implement innovative solutions that significantly improve the management of production barriers, ideas, and shop floor meeting cycles. The fundamental goal is to accelerate their overall processes from identifying the issues to ensuring proper communication, informed decision making, and smart execution of those decisions, consistently, in all their locations around the globe. Even small improvements to targeted processes can have massive ramifications over time: when multiplied over every location, significant cost savings and production improvements result in more satisfied customers along the entire manufacturing value chain.

One example of a targeted process where Decisyon has been able to deliver a successful digitalization solution is Short Interval Management (SIM). SIM is a factory-floor lean manufacturing process for driving production improvements during the shift. Within each SIM, plant-floor employees use data to identify and implement improvement actions in meetings that last no more than 15 minutes. These improvement actions may be counter measures to ongoing or emerging problems, or they may be actions to improve existing production. SIM encourages teams to work together to achieve regular, incremental improvements to the manufacturing process. The full process allows the scaling of ideas, action and barriers at different levels of the operations from line operators to line managers, plant managers and support function managers (safety & quality, maintenance, etc.). The preferred way to do this is to couple SIMs with a process that escalates problems and solutions to a higher level of review. Decisyon’s Digital Lean Manufacturing Optimizer (DLMO) application greatly simplifies productivity tasks, facilitates the centralized capture and sharing of knowledge and empowers manufacturers to experience significant ROI and unprecedented collaboration within their shop floors.

Decisyon Digital Lean Manufacturing Optimizer (DLMO)

One of our current partners, Schneider Electric Global Supply Chain (GSC), the global multi-billion-dollar manufacturing conglomerate, asked us to design and develop a solution with the ability to connect tens of thousands of users in almost 200 of their plants spread over five continents. The goal of the application was to empower thousands of users from IT and OT to globally collaborate, make faster and smarter decisions and solve production problems while reducing downtimes and time-to-value. The company needed significant improvement in OEE and required their new solution to accelerate decision making in lean manufacturing meetings and implementation of remedial actions.

To address Schneider Electric GSC’s specific requirements, Decisyon designed and introduced a fully mobile, actionable, end-to-end DLMO application that fully digitalized and optimized their entire Lean Manufacturing process. DLMO enables Schneider Electric’s employees to quickly analyze ideas and actions, accelerating decision making and problem resolutions. It also provides automatic KPIs for process efficiency, bringing a global standardization and robustness to short interval cycles for all the plants around the world, while preserving local flexibility and control. Decisyon App Composer™ (DAC) was used to develop this new application for Schneider Electric, and we’re pleased to report that our customer is broadly using DLMO to their advantage.

Anthony Loy, VP Smart and Sustainable Industrial Ecosystem Transformation at Schneider Electric, who is responsible for the plants using Decisyon’s Lean Manufacturing Optimizer application, recently told us “Using the native collaboration capabilities and data-driven execution functions of Decisyon App Composer, part of EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor, Schneider Electric’s Global Supply Chain has transformed almost 200 plants to work like they belong to a unique human being with one heartbeat guided by our Smart Factory digital brain.”

When Decisyon’s CEO Alex Aminian meets with customers, he explains that Decisyon’s App Composer has not only dramatically accelerated solution creation and deployment but more importantly, DAC’s out-of-the-box collaborative data-driven capabilities improve the engagement for operational teams. This powerful combination empowers the teams with a greater degree of autonomy and responsibility for how equipment runs along with the ability to generate ideas and provide visible and measurable results.

Decisyon’s objective as an IIoT solution provider is focused on the long term, to facilitate the culture of continuous improvement, where operators are actively engaged in suggesting and implementing improvements on an ongoing basis in an easy-to use collaborative application. Working with Schneider Electric GSC, I’ve seen our collective organizations experience an unprecedented capability to leverage project management and product development analysis to create a unique solution able to run in hundreds of plants in different regions, overcoming all possible cultural, process, architectural and data-related constraints. This is a perfect example of how it’s possible to digitally transform manufacturing following a corporate top-down approach with a shared vision.

Other customers implementing Decisyon solutions have achieved significant ROI and business impacts including:

• Up to 10% increase in productivity of production lines
• Up to 25% reduction of activities for shift handovers
• Up to 10% reduction of delays in maintenance intervention
• Up to 25% reduction of data collection activities for process excellence meetings

Learn firsthand the power of Digital Lean Manufacturing Optimizer with Decisyon. We are in the business of helping manufacturers future-proof their businesses, digitalizing them with the products and services that empower them to compete and prevail in their industry space. We can help you to quickly transform to a comprehensive digital environment to accelerate your manufacturing outcomes. Speak with one of our solutions experts today.

Read the full use case that allowed Schneider Electric GSC to connect over 50,000 users in nearly 200 plants globally to collaborate, make decisions and solve problems.