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S.C. auto industry: How to be smart about smart manufacturing

Molly Hulsey //October 30, 2020//

S.C. auto industry: How to be smart about smart manufacturing

Molly Hulsey //October 30, 2020//

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A JTEKT representative mans booth at the 2020 S.C. Automotive Summit earlier this year. (Photo/John Carlos)There is only so much “kaizen” — the Japanese term for continuous improvement — that can take place without implementing what has become known Manufacturing 4.0 technologies, according to Antonio Vaz, director of production engineering at JTEKT North America.

Manufacturing 4.0 technologies, the harbinger of the “fourth industrial revolution,” include increased automation, artificial intelligence, predictive maintenance and augmented reality, just to name a few.

“Our main focus has been on eliminating a lot of the waste,” Vaz said during his keynote speech at the S.C. Manufacturing Conference, adding that automation isn’t used to necessarily replace the human workforce on the factory floor but to make the most of human skills machines can’t emulate, for example, interpersonal collaboration and creative problem solving.

While JTEKT’s Japanese locations have been much more enthusiastic in adopting completely automated manufacturing practices due to a quickly shrinking labor pool, North American 4.0 innovation tends to center around tools used to help human technicians perfect and streamline their work, Vaz said.

Still, the adoption rate of these technologies is a still “pretty slow,” he said, as it takes time to determine which new technologies actually help propel a company’s business model forward and which are just a glossy (and expensive) gadgets.

“It’s not about technology, it’s about people,” he said. “It’s about process — then it’s about technology. If we don’t address these three, it’s not going to be successful.”

One of the practices that JTEKT has seen to be advantageous so far is the adoption of automatic guided vehicles used to transport materials from place to place around plants. It first began with vehicles programmed to move in straight lines, but now, AGVs implanted with GPS can maneuver throughout a manufacturing campus on its own.

The use of ever-evolving AGVs also aids Volvo in its goal to use 4.0 technologies to “redirect manpower away from processes that pose safety or ergonomic risks,” according to Kevin Graham, director of plant engineering at the Lowcountry’s Volvo plant.

Not only are the risks of an employee injuring him or herself while maneuvering a heavy cart of fixtures mitigated with the use of AGVs, this automated system also helps make the most of an already stretched manufacturing labor force.

Other 4.0 technologies employed by Volvo include the use of an iPhone program used to carry out the visual inspection of products with a 98% confidence level. The program notifies shift managers with text messages if a product appears to be faulty, including soft-set conditions that can’t be detected by the human eye, Graham said.

“In the automotive world, this could mean the difference between a car proceeding straight and ready for shipping or several hours troubleshooting or repairing,” he said.

Augmented reality has also been installed as a key feature of employee training, while artificial intelligence will soon become a future component of Volvo’s preliminary hiring and candidate vetting process.

While the creation of the iPhone inspection program was outsourced to an international technology firm, Volvo’s Smart Manufacturing and Innovation Team and Silicon Valley-based research and development team expect the next step will be the internal development and design of automated guided vehicles, predictive analytics, additive manufacturing and other 4.0 innovations.

“We believe we can create greater synergy in integrating exactly what a process requires: nothing more and nothing less — and at a much lower cost,” he said, adding that internal smart manufacturing development simply contributes to a “lean way of thinking.”

Robert Bosch has long been on the cutting edge of Manufacturing 4.0 technologies through its deployment of intelligent and predictive maintenance solutions and its transition toward an entirely digitized shopfloor management system with real-time data supplied by machine data and an ERP program. This year, Bosch became one of the first main auto suppliers to go C02 neutral due to energy-saving processes that would not be possible without today’s intelligent monitoring systems, according to Kai Woerner, vice president and technical plant manager at Robert Bosch.

“Technology is not our limitation at the moment,” he said. “It’s the skill sets of our associates.”

Still, Woerner admitted that the adoption of 4.0 technologies must be intentionally married to an overarching business plan to be impactful and effective, something the company is working toward with the creation of an i4.0 and AI implementation and steering committee.

Richard Phillips, director of smart manufacturing solutions for Polytron Inc., echoed that companies often make the mistake of adopting 4.0 technologies just for its own sake without first identifying the problems these tools are supposed to solve.

“There’s several studies and surveys that 80% of these pilots, in terms of industry 4.0 or smart factories, fail or don’t move forward,” said Phillips. “And they fail or don’t move forward because some of these best business practices aren’t focused — again, the business driver, aligning the stakeholder to make sure it’s successful, making sure they pick the right pilot, making sure the technology is the result of your engineering assessment to determine the best tool.”

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