prd: productivity (oee)

Downstream of continuous casting or the casting pit there are normally one or more blank processing plants (rolling mills, presses, wire-drawing machines and production lines for wire-drawing mills and pipe mills). In this part of the production process, too, it is vital to identify ways of improving the efficiency of the plant and logistics flows.

Plant efficiency cannot be increased by means of a single specific intervention, it is the result of numerous optimised factors, each of which has a low incidence on the overall efficiency of the plant but the sum total allows a major overall improvement. Examples are micro-stoppages, tooling times, reduced consumption thanks to well-planned preventive maintenance, careful equipment management in terms of life and location, identification of causes of rejects and their reduction.

The organisation should not waste valuable time and human resources interpreting and reorganising manual or local information in printed reports for everyone to read, but all company functions need to have in real time definite and complete details of plant productivity that are collected automatically, integrated and correlated in the system, so that the various heads of department can use their time to study measures for continuous improvement.

The MILL+ suite meets these needs with the PRD Framework, which provides a “lens” for highlighting in real time hidden costs that are not visible to the naked eye, and a “gauge” for measuring corrective actions and continuous improvements.

The solution based on the MILL+ suite’s PRD Framework offers numerous advantages. The main ones are listed below.

• Standard, modular and expandable hardware architecture.

• Automatic acquisition of plant data (pieces, production times and downtimes, events) using a SIEMENS™ PLC to avoid manual reporting.

• Multi-platform client/server architecture (SQL SERVER™ / ORACLE™) based on Microsoft.Net technology.

• Integration with the most common ERP systems, allowing exact cost allocation thanks to accurate and detailed information.

• Elimination of paper and paperwork, and all transcription errors and omissions.

• Real-time plant data display on all company PCs.

• Complete, definite data available in real time to provide management cockpits for the periodic monitoring and analysis of performance, efficiency and OEE.

• Complete and configurable detailed analysis of downtimes and rejects.

• Tooling, reworking and extra-processing management.

• Sharing of univocal and exact information by all company departments, allowing continuous improvement of flows and processes.

• Optimisation of the scheduling process with automatic state-of-progress reporting in terms of times and items for each production order.