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 Cannondale
Inc. is the world's leading manufacturer of aluminum bicycles,
producing more than 60 models for the U.S. market alone. New
designs are developed in Connecticut six times per year, then
assembled in Pennsylvania and hand-painted for quality. But
getting the color right when a new model comes out has been
something of a guessing game. So what's a painter to do?
Now, the answer is simple, even for a $164 million manufacturer
such as Cannondale. The painter just checks the instructions
and color picture on the company's Web server.
THE
BOTTOM LINE
| Smokestack industries are
turning to Web technology - from kiosks and
tiny cameras to Net-enabled software - to
rev up production speed and quality on assembly
lines. |
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Cannondale is just one company that has added Web technology
to its manufacturing process over the past two years. Suddenly,
the World Wide Web is moving onto the factory floor, providing
companies with an inexpensive means to link workers and the
machines they operate to remote repositories of information.
Distant managers now watch what's going on, literally, from
wherever they are.
With tiny Web cameras and Web displays being built directly
into equipment deployed on assembly lines, using Internet
technologies to speed products to market is not just the province
of software companies and other purveyors of digital goods.
Smokestack industries are revving up the speed and quality
of delivering to market everything from tool machines to wood
panels.
"Using browser technology as the standard interface has training
advantages and saves software development time and trouble,"
said Dennis Byron, an analyst at International Data Corp.
Software that integrates Internet technologies into factory
operations is a small but growing portion of a $4.8 billion
market for prepackaged manufacturing software, which itself
is growing 14.2 percent a year, according to IDC.
In the Cannondale case, designs produced at the company's
Bethel, Conn., headquarters, go into a Progress Software Corp.
WebSpeed database as drawings.
Supervisors on the production floor take the designs and
add a bill of material, listing all of the parts needed to
make the new model. Prototypes are built based on the drawing;
then they are photographed. The photographs replace the design
drawing in the WebSpeed database, providing designers, production
workers, painters and customers the same picture through the
Web site.
When the bicycle is in production in Bedford, Pa., assembly
instructions and painting examples are listed on Web client
stations for all employees to see. The paint job a customer
sees on the Web site is the exact same hand-applied paint
job the bicycle will receive.
"Two years ago, we only had text descriptions for the painters,"
engineer Bill Miller said. "Last year, we had a booklet with
pictures [which was] almost immediately out of date. Now,
we have the same electronic image for each bicycle model everywhere."
Using The Web As A Window
The Web has just begun to make its first tentative steps
onto the factory floor at Northern Telecom Ltd., but it will
enter almost every aspect of the telecommunications giant's
manufacturing operations in the years ahead.
At Nortel's Westwinds wireless plant in Calgary, Alberta,
which manufactures base stations for cellular phone networks,
factory workers tap into the company's intranet to retrieve
a wide range of documents related to health, quality control
and safety, as well as general operating procedures.
Those documents have been replaced by COSMOS - COmmon Sense
Management Operating System - which essentially is an online
repository on Nortel's intranet for all of the documents related
to the manufacturing process.
Vince Guthro, COSMOS project manager, said that when workers
had questions related to manufacturing procedures, they traditionally
would thumb through stacks of binders filled with diagrams,
manuals and policy guidelines to find the answers.
"It's saved a couple of forests, and we don't have people
running around constantly updating binders," Guthro said.
"More importantly, COSMOS allows our employees to get to the
information they need faster."
Nortel conducted an experiment to test the benefits of the
system by asking an employee to find documentation relating
to the effect of static electricity on the wireless base stations
they produce. Guthro said it took 45 minutes for the worker
to find the correct documents by thumbing through the binder
library - and only five minutes to find the same documents
on COSMOS.
Providing manufacturing information works both ways. Companies
need to monitor their manufacturing process, and the Web helps
there as well.
Chris Koencke, director of e-business at Nortel's Enterprise
Networks, said work is under way to use the Web as a window
into virtually all aspects of the company's business and manufacturing
processes.
"What we'd like to do is deploy a Federal Express [Corp.]-type
model, where customers would be able to check on the status
of their order right down to what street corner their product
is sitting at today," Koencke said. Nortel is working with
The Baan Co. to put its backroom operations online in such
a fashion that customers and suppliers will be able to place
or fulfill orders and check their status over an extranet.
"The sales guy, our feet on the street, spends a disproportionate
amount of time answering simple questions, such as 'where
is my order?' The customer should be able to answer that themselves,"
Koencke said.
Bruce Honda, a senior process engineer at Weyerhaeuser Co.,
knew the more eyes and ears on the factory floor, the better.
The Weyerhaeuser facility in Sutton, W.Va., produces wood
panels measuring 12 feet by 24 feet, each weighing 500 pounds.
Jammed machinery costs hundreds of dollars per minute in lost
revenue - and is hard to clean up. So, Honda ordered some
Web-enabled electronic eyes.
The Axis 240 sports five camera connections controlled by
a Web server. "One server, with a single IP [Internet Protocol]
address, can run up to five cameras and communicate over an
Ethernet network or phone line via a modem," said Jeff Mesnik,
business unit leader at Axis Communications.
The five-port server is mounted on one wall, with one camera
in each of the room's four corners watching the 12-foot-by-24-foot
sheets of oriented strand board zoom by at several hundred
feet per minute. Gaps, jams, skewed boards and overheated
wood or machines can be monitored.
The system is watched constantly in the control room, and
many people in production support offices elsewhere in the
factory can watch what's going on from their desktop systems.
One jam was noticed by an employee in a separate building,
who alerted the floor personnel and avoided a production shutdown.
Visualization improves with competition, as shown by Perceptual
Robotics Inc. The company makes a software-only camera server
with, literally, a twist.
"Our systems control the camera, allowing the viewer to zoom
in or direct the camera view simply by clicking on the image,"
said President Paul Cooper. "We call this technology 'telepresence'
to convey the feeling of being where the camera is, since
you control what the camera sees."
Systems are in place at major automotive manufacturing plants,
oil company refineries and even at a U.S. Army artillery testing
range to monitor equipment tests from both coasts - rather
than by standing in a live firing range.
Combining visualization with supply-chain management, one
large aerospace customer uses Perceptual Robotics on suppliers'
factory floors. "Using the aim and zoom capabilities of the
camera, the primary manufacturer watches the wing assemblies
being made by the subcontractor in real-time," Cooper said.
Airplane manufacturer executives also can show customers their
planes being assembled all over the world - without leaving
a conference room.
Visualization is increasingly inexpensive. The Axis 200 Plus,
a system with a single camera, retails for $999 with the camera.
The Axis 240, with five camera inputs, also retails for $999,
but does not include any cameras. The Perceptual Robotics
software ranges from $1,000 for a factory-level installation
to $10,000 for a broadcast-quality television installation;
it does not include a camera or server hardware.
Mixing In Machine Feedback
In addition to cameras, Weyerhaeuser uses the InTouch Human-Machine
Interface from Wonderware Corp. "The software ties the process
control machines to a PC and feeds production figures and
line speed to the control room with only a few seconds of
delay," Honda said. Knowing exactly what each machine is doing
assures the control room that all is well; the sooner any
malfunction is spotted, the easier it is to repair.
Now based on Windows NT, Wonderware remains closely tied
to Microsoft Corp. Wonderware developed NetDDE (Network Dynamic
Data Exchange) in the early 1990s to exchange factory machine
information; it licensed the software to Microsoft.
"We were the first company to tie PCs to the machines and
present the remote operator a graphic representation of dials
and meters they were used to seeing on the machine itself,"
said Jim Brown, director of North American sales.
Existing machines can be controlled if they have a communications
port. Wonderware has written drivers for more than 600 different
devices, and third parties have written drivers for another
1,100 machines.
"We can tell the machine how to do a process, monitor that
process and report on how well the machine did," Brown said.
Taking a cue from office productivity suites, Wonderware bundled
its own factory tools into a FactorySuite two years ago. Now,
its software helps monitor everything from rides at Walt Disney
World to sewage treatment plants.
The urge to mix machine feedback and visualization is strong
- and elemental. "One of our earliest factory camera applications
was a customer focusing a single camera on a machine's dials
and gauges," Axis' Mesnik said. Monitoring a screen from a
control room is more comfortable than standing beside a giant
machine on the floor, and one person can monitor many screens
at once.
Integrating Into In-House Items
These suites of Web-enabled factory software can even find
a place in the exacting process of making microchips. Consilium
Inc.'s FAB300 software, for instance, is used to control the
production of the wafers that get chopped into chips. By the
middle of next year, the company's software will be able to
control all chip manufacturing operations through a Web browser.
Add-on systems like Wonderware's and Consilium's are popular
because factory machines are expensive to replace. Software
in intelligent machines with embedded system controllers can
be upgraded. "When possible, companies change the software
in their machines rather than replace the machines themselves,"
said IDC's Byron.
Makino Inc., a Japanese producer of industrial tools, is
going so far as to integrate Web links into the machines it
sells for use on the factory floor. The company plans to unveil
its Makino Link products at an industry trade show in September.
"Makino Link is a real-time link from our machine on the
customer's factory floor to our customer service, engineering
and documentation departments," said Steve Colston, marketing
manager for Makino's die-mold group. Operations manuals, diagrams
and maintenance information from a special customer section
of the Makino Web site will give operators, through a chat
function, instant access to Makino support personnel.
Currently, a kiosk next to the die and mold equipment provides
access to Web information. But upcoming products will have
the Web connection integrated directly into the machines themselves
on a cathode ray tube.
"Customers usually try to fix machines themselves before
they call our support department, and we want them to have
the latest information possible," Colston said. Die-mold machines
cost a minimum of $500,000 and remain in service for 10 to
15 years, so maintenance is critical.
Traditionally, manufacturers don't move fast.
But Wonderware's Brown said he believes they are pulling
manufacturers into the current world of information technology.
"How can a manufacturer resist a system that takes an order,
formulates what needs to be built, defines the parameters,
analyzes quality during the building process, reports that
[information] back to accounting - and presents you with a
product for your customer and a complete genealogy trail to
make your liability lawyers and insurance company happy?"
Brown asked.
The Web and factory floor combination mean one thing to Cannondale's
Miller: "Our goal was to shrink our development cycle, and
we did." Four years ago, Cannondale released a single line
of bicycles once a year. Today, it produces six lines - three
domestic and three European - guaranteeing the newest styles
and components are available throughout the year.
Web speed makes it possible. After all, Miller said: "We
carved our niche by being faster to market with new products."
Cannondale can be
reached at www.cannondale.com
IDC can be reached at www.idc.com
Nortel can be reached
at www.nortel.com
Baan can be reached at
www.baan.com
Weyerhaeuser can
be reached at www.weyerhaeuser.com
Axis Communications can
be reached at www.axis.com
Perceptual Robotics
can be reached at www.perceptualrobotics.com
Wonderware can be
reached at www.wonderware.com
Consilium can be reached
at www.consilium.com
Makino can be reached
at www.makino.com
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(c) 1998 ZD, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole
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