How plastics manufacturers are maximizing existing machinery

It's fascinating to visit plastics manufacturers' shop floors and see the history of their business told in the machinery used to launch their businesses running alongside the latest machinery installed to help them grow. So many of these businesses got their start as suppliers to Tier 1 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) or by taking on short-notice, custom production runs competitors couldn't.

At first, rejuvenating machinery that's made solid contributions for years was a necessity. Now it's becoming a strategic pathway to greater shop floor productivity and meeting ambitious new supplier goals for compliance, cycle times and quality. Notably, a Decision Analyst survey of 150 North American manufacturers completed in conjunction with IQMS/Dassault Systems found that 73 percent of the plastics manufacturers have fully depreciated machinery operating on their shop floors today. And 41 percent of plastics processors surveyed are opting to upgrade existing machinery and prolong their useful lives.

Fully depreciated machines in good operating condition are indispensable in giving customers the option of short-notice production runs at higher margins. It's one of the best strategies for generating an additional revenue stream over and above planned and scheduled jobs.

The 41 percent of plastics manufacturers upgrading existing machinery cite several reasons for doing so. These machines have passed customer and regulatory audits and compliance tests. They have predictable cycle times by the types of products being produced, and they have years to decades worth of quality data available for troubleshooting problems. Best of all, from a labor standpoint, production teams are all certified on the oldest, most proven machines, making scheduling much easier.

The paradox facing plastics manufacturers today is how to achieve lights-out manufacturing production shifts with machinery designed before unattended operation was possible. Ripping and replacing an entire production floor of machinery and supporting systems is out of the question. Instead, plastics processors are relying on some combination of current and previous generation production equipment to achieve this goal.

The survey found some common threads across plastics manufacturers whether they're using new smart, connected machines or older machinery updated with sensors to capture data. Among these respondents, 38 percent are adopting real-time monitoring and manufacturing execution system (MES) software to gain insights from machine data. Meanwhile, 33 percent are upgrading or replacing their quality management system (QMS) software to better utilize shop floor data.

Increasingly, plastics manufacturers seeking improvements in product quality and efficiency are utilizing their shop floor data to enable lights-out manufacturing. Insights gained from reducing scrap, return material authorization (RMA) rates and other metrics using a QMS provide the first step in achieving an initial lights-out shift. Meanwhile, real-time monitoring provides the insights needed at the machine and process level to stabilize, scale and automate equipment across multiple shifts. Finally, feeding these insights into quality management and MES software enables plastics manufacturers to understand what factors best stabilized their initial lights-out manufacturing shift, so they can then scale it to a second or third shift.

Taken together, upgrading existing machinery and gaining the new data-driven insights from real-time monitoring is helping every plastics manufacturer to achieve lights-out manufacturing and become a stronger global competitor in the process.

Louis Columbus is a principal at Delmiaworks, formerly called IQMS, an ERP software developer for manufacturers.