CALIBRATION & MAINTENANCE AM HELPS KEEP THINGS MOVING
The cost of waiting: how technology can help reduce unplanned downtime. By Alan Yu, Senior Application Engineer, Markforged
a significant challenge, causing unexpected disruptions to production lines that can result in delays and subsequent financial losses. For food and beverage manufacturers, the impact of unplanned downtime is felt across their businesses and supply chains. Small faults and anomalies on the factory floor can cause misaligned processes or operational slowdowns, leading to missed or incomplete order fulfilments, frustrated customers and suppliers, and – potentially - bad press. According to a study from global industrial asset performance management consultants, Bently Nevada, in the past three years 82% of companies have faced unplanned downtime. Closer to home, the ‘Industry in Motion’ 2023 Maintenance Engineering Report from RS Components and Institute of Mechanical Engineers highlights that 19.6 hours are spent weekly on unscheduled maintenance, with an average hourly cost of plant downtime at £5,121, citing ageing assets and mechanical failures as the biggest drivers. Reducing downtime through modernisation – step by step
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With legacy technology (and its tendency for potential failure), identified as a major factor leading to unplanned downtime, the industry’s thoughts turn to modernisation and working towards ‘smart manufacturing’. While these can be daunting prospects, understanding the cost of maintaining the status quo is a good place to start. Building a picture of how often lines go down, and how much even a short blip in operations can cost the
business, can help to build a case for investment in change. To do this, it helps to take things one step at a time. Start by investigating small issues that are slowing things down. For example, we’ve seen situations at customer sites
10 NOVEMBER 2024 | PROCESS & CONTROL
n today's fast-paced world of manufacturing, every minute counts and efficiency is key. Unplanned downtime poses
Food and beverage manufacturers can avoid unplanned downtime by using 3D printers to create replacement and spare parts
where bottles regularly bumping into end-of- arm-tooling on robotic lines cause wear and tear and slow down lines. Day-to-day, this isn’t a huge issue, but left uncorrected this seemingly small malfunction eventually causes the tooling to break, bringing the line to a halt. This can cost the business greatly in terms of downtime in man hours, not to mention in spare parts.
This scenario introduces another key set of questions: ∙ Do you know what you’re spending on replacing tooling and parts? ∙ How many spares do you keep in stock to avoid too much downtime? ∙ What do you do if you need a new legacy part for an outdated machine?
Having the answers to these questions helps to paint a picture of the overall cost to the business of keeping things as they are. It can then be a helpful first step in building a solid business case for investing in technology that can improve the status quo without causing mass disruption to the factory floor.
Additive and on-demand
manufacturing In recent years, we have seen more companies integrate technologies like
additive manufacturing (AM) into their factory floor operations to work alongside traditional processes and machines. These enable more immediate and cost-effective manufacturing at the point of need – helping to meet
the ‘cost of waiting’ challenges head on without having to rebuild or reconfigure entire production lines.
AM can help manufacturers to avoid unplanned downtime and keep things moving for their customers. By using 3D printers to create replacement and spare parts, companies can plan for problems, fix things quickly and improve their production processes directly on their factory floors. This ability to replace faulty or failing machine parts on-demand not only increases resiliency of their production lines, but is ushering in digital inventories and the end of reactive downtime. Printing the parts they need, when and where they need them helps replace physical storage for replacement parts and tooling, creating digital inventories. In addition to lowering the high economic and environmental cost of long-distance shipping, digital inventories help to reduce waste and storage costs as well as diminish the ‘cost of waiting’ by speeding up repair cycles and response times.
AM also allows for customisation to suit
specific production line requirements. It can also incorporate more complex geometries than traditional manufacturing methods, allowing for stronger, lighter weight structures. These benefits are particularly useful on food and beverage packaging lines when it comes to keeping up with rapidly multiplying SKUs and frequently refreshed packaging.
AM is fast becoming a more integral part of production lines and will continue to do so – helping to save costs, avoid downtime and increase factory floor resilience and efficiency.
Markforged
www.markforged.com
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