MTA

MTA is a leading manufacturer of electrical and electronic components for the automotive industry. Founded in Codogno, Italy, in 1954, MTA now has 5 branches abroad, a local production unit in Concordia sul Secchia, Modena, a yearly turnover of around €90m and over 600 employees.

The company handles product development, from design to production, and offers the customer a highly reliable, flexible and competent service. The company mainly makes electronic instrument panels, power distribution boxes, electronic control units, armrests, fuses and fuse-holders, terminals and connectors, battery terminals, level sensors, and radiator and oil caps.

In recent years it has become increasingly important to monitor the behaviour of all the machines in order to take a snapshot of reality at any moment abd establish what can be improved and how to increase productivity in terms of technical and organisational measures.

The data available for process analysis and optimisation were originally based solely on hand-written reports in the management system of quantities produced per shift and manual form compiling where, for each shift, the operator had to record the time and duration of the main stoppages. Only for some automatic assembly machines were there reports created automatically by dedicated software, which obviously varied from manufacturer to manufacturer in terms of structure and data recording method, with no possibility of integration.

The main problems associated with this situation were undoubtedly:

• The huge amount of work required to enter all data by hand, leading to a high risk of error.

• Data not available until at least one day later.

• Discrepancy and poor reliability of the data used to analyse machine behaviour.

• Laborious data processing and general performance indices only available for a whole department or at most a group of similar machines.

Controlling and improving overall production processes, however, requires prompt, complete, reliable, and accurate information that is not based on handwritten statements. So the aim of MTA’s top management  was to find an MES solution to get round all these problems.

“After a careful scrutiny of a series of offers from various companies – says Ezio Pagani, an engineer at MTA – we decided to opt for STAIN, as it was the only company able to integrate industrial automation skills for interfacing all types of machinery and MES skills and developing a production, logistics and SPC information system. So, with support from STAIN, we undertook an in-depth study of all aspects of MTA to enable us to develop a solution to meet our specific requirements, in which data from each machine could be relayed to the new SAP/R3 management system that had been installed in the meantime.”

STAIN’s MES solution provided the following advantages in terms of organisation and technology:

• All in-house PCs can display in real time machine status, performance and state of progress in production, the result being control of all the machines, immediate visibility of what they are making and how efficiently, and reduced times for responding to unexpected events.

• Machine statuses (stop, production, tooling), items produced, and causes of rejects and stoppages are gathered automatically from the various machines and production lines, without the operator having to compile any manual reports.

• Integration with SAP allows production orders to be received electronically and transmitted to the various work centres, thereby avoiding all paperwork.

• Just-in-time relaying to SAP of each work sheet optimizes production scheduling and logistics flow  management, and avoids time wasting and errors due to manual data entry.

• A description of each significant production event and all its characterizing attributes are recorded in databases for each machine. Thanks to this high level of detail, the user can query the system and obtain all kinds of summaries of productivity data (by machine, date, job order, article, work sheet, production order, shift, die and numerous other filters).

• Highly accurate analytical data and  powerful modular standard technology enable the various departments at MTA (top management, production engineering, plant quality, industrialization and maintenance) to analyse vast quantities of data very quickly. It is also possible for the heads of department and operators to handle the information very quickly and easily.

The advantages for the company of using all this new information available following investment in STAIN technology are mainly linked to process optimisation:

• ENHANCED MACHINE EFFICIENCY and CONSTANT MAINTENANCE in both technical and organisational terms.

• FEWER REJECTS thanks to accurate monitoring of the causes.

• OPTIMIZATION of preventive and predictive MAINTENANCE thanks to the availability of accurate data, not overall averages.

• PRODUCT QUALITY CONTROL using electronic control plans for article/customer, and automatic compiling of XR/XS charts with automatically acquired field values based on the control plan.