Production Monitoring Automates Molder’s Planning, Operations

Established in 1996, Diverse Corporate Technologies (DCT) in Forest City, North Carolina, launched its manufacturing facility with two injection molding machines. As it grew into custom molding, two presses became eight and DCT grew to more than 40 employees, running operations 24/5.

With that growth came growing pains, particularly in how DCT captured, uploaded, shared and interpreted production data. John Wright, projects manager, notes that in the past, each operator would fill out a sheet of paper during each shift, keeping track of, among other things, a hand count of parts manufactured. Another individual would then manually enter that information into an Excel spreadsheet for all three shifts.

“During all that expansion, we just needed more help on keeping up with inventory and scheduling because material planning took a long time,” says Brent Cordes, DCT manufacturing manager. “That’s where we started looking for alternative software to help us keep up with all this.”

That alternative software came in the form of Intouch Monitoring’s production monitoring and MES system. Intouch offers — and DCT availed itself of — a 60-day free trial, as well as free training and free ERP integration (NetSuite in the case of DCT). Following the trial, users pay a monthly subscription fee.

What’s the Plan?

Material planning is a challenge at any molder, with miscalculations impacting the management of inventory and production, but at DCT, where inventory and raw materials are stored in warehouses separate from the production floor, the impact of a scheduling snafu was especially acute.

“Every day, we’re transporting raw material from that warehouse to our manufacturing building,” Wright says. “We run over and calculate how much material are we going to need for the next 24 hours, the next 30 hours, and we make sure we have it on hand, so we never run out.”

Those hand-tallied records gave DCT an inkling of what was to come based on what had gone before. “We try to run inventory based on historical data,” Cordes says. “With injection molding, you’re trying to keep a rhythm and always keep your machines running, but to do that, you have to have enough raw material; you have to have enough packaging.”

And when you don’t have enough materials on hand? Wright calls it the “inch-worm” effect. “You have everything you need for a week, and then you run out and have to order everything again,” Wright says. “Machines are up for a week. You hit it hard again for another week or two, and then you run out.”

Intouch expanded the depth and breadth of DCT’s past production figures to inform future purchasing and planning and avoid the inchworm. “Now one person can put in the schedule and keep up with what’s going on,” Wright says. “It’s a few clicks, drag-and-drop here and then go on to doing other things. Before, it was multiple people spending hours per week trying to figure out what was going on and not really being sure what was.”

Now that DCT is capturing quality data it wants to share it with employees. To that end, in addition to ERP integration, there are monitors throughout the building and tablets on every machine. DCT has found that its technicians pay attention to these displays with a keen eye for one color.

“Our employees want their machine to hit green and have them stay green,” Cordes says. “Just bringing the monitor out to the floor and having the tablets increased our productivity and our quality because it brought awareness to everybody.” Green equals rhythm. “Intouch helps us keep a nonstop rhythm,” Cordes says. “A steady flow of production based on our raw material supply and how much inventory we want to keep on hand.”