Hanson Building Products

It has become a key foundation block in our pursuits with continuous improvement, the ability to process Operational Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) dynamically has allowed us to better quantify loss and enhance our capital expenditure application process with “real” data. Our original systems were paper-based and reliant upon operators recording the downtime, this led to ambiguity and also a lot of non-value added activity for the management team processing the information. The intouch system links directly into your machine operating systems so it quantifies the downtime accurately.

The mimic diagrams have been tailored to the specific needs of our plant management team, which concisely illustrates where the plant is running and shows process bottlenecks very quickly. The production and engineering staff are very complimentary of how information is captured through the use of HMI displays that are located on each machine, one operator said “It’s so easy, when the machine stops, all I have to do is press a few buttons and it captures the data there and then! It saves me a lot of time as no longer have to fill in handwritten process logs”.

It has also been used during plant start-ups, having recently reopened the Accrington Brick manufacturing plant at the start of 2015 it was utilised during the factory acceptance trials to sign off against the agreed performance criteria.

With a further 4 plants planned for implementation of the system in 2015, it will then enable an Enterprise strategy to be realised, as it is possible for senior management personnel to access the information through any PC providing it is on the business network.

Tailor-made reports have been created that allow the data to be consolidated and stratified so that key business decisions can be made quickly.

In some sites, we have already seen up to a 20-30% increase in OEE which we wouldn’t have been able to properly quantify without this system in place, the Intouch Production Monitoring system has therefore been a major part to our success in 2014 and I’d certainly recommend it as a manufacturing tool.

James Jeffcott
MIChemE CEng (Hons)
Process Engineering Manager