MSNBC
August 1998



 
Cyberspace goes blue-collar
 
The Web is moving onto the factory floor, offering an inexpensive means to link workers, machines, information  
Cannondale uses the Web to, among other things, get the color right on new models  
By James E. Gaskin, Inter@ctive Week Online
ZDNN
Aug. 17 —  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?
 
“Two years ago, we only had text descriptions for the painters. Last year, we had a booklet with pictures, [which was] almost immediately out of date.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.” 
— BILL MILLER
Cannondale engineer 		        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. 
       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. 
 
MORE EYES AND EARS ON THE FACTORY FLOOR
      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.” 
— CHRIS KOENCKE
Director of e-business at Nortel's Enterprise Networks 		        “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. 
Wonderware's software gives workers a graphic representation of what the machines are doing         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. (Microsoft is a partner with NBC in the joint venture that operates MSNBC.) 
       “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.”
 

MSNBC
August 1998