CASE STUDIES
Talisman Plastics
Talisman Plastics used Intouch i4 Cloud to switch to 24/7 operation to meet increased demand for medical equipment due to COVID-19.
Talisman are now able to leave the factory completely unmanned during weekends
‘We can also remotely monitor the machines, and email alerts let us know when machines have been stopped longer than 30 minutes. It has helped us increase the efficiency of our machines producing NHS equipment from 75 per cent up to 95 per cent.’
Talisman Plastics, a state-of-the-art manufacturer with nearly 100 years of experience of producing injection moulded products for a wide variety of sectors including aerospace, medical, automotive, electronics and white goods implemented the Intouch i4 Cloud in 2019 in all its 27 machines, two of which produce key NHS medical equipment.
Talisman’s ethos is “doing the right thing for the customers” and in order to ensure that they meet the increased demand for medical equipment due to COVID-19, they have switched their medical equipment machines to 24/7 operation.
The Intouch i4 Cloud allows them to leave the machines completely unmanned during the 48 hours of the weekend, increasing production whilst keeping their staff safe.
Using the Intouch i4 Cloud, Talisman staff can remotely access the following with their phones (or on other devices such as laptops and tablets):
- Mimic displays which shows real-time machine status and the shift profile
- Clicking on the virtual machines gives them more detailed information of the machine
- Downtime alerts were created (in the form of emails sent to designated users)
Following their first unmanned weekend, Talisman Production Manager, Ewelina Skalska said:
‘We have found it extremely useful and it helped us to reduce downtime to a minimum – The downtime reports listing the reasons for downtime, the shift profile – how many times the machine stopped within the shift and why!
And of course, recently the mobile phone option, where we can remotely monitor machines’ downtime. Email alerts letting us know when machines have been stopped for longer than 30 minutes is a massive improvement and it helped us to improve BT Cells (NHS) machines efficiency from approx… 75% to over 95%!’
We pride ourselves on our excellent customer service, but it is always nice to hear it:
‘We are very impressed with Intouch customer service – especially with Lucy, who always comes back to us within 1 hour or so and is always ever so helpful. We are amazed at how quickly Lucy managed to help us set up Intouch on our mobile phones for several users and machine downtime alerts last Friday – especially at such a critical moment, when we have Hospitals chasing us for parts (BT Cells machines). ‘
On the whole, Talisman Plastics have found that Intouch has greatly improved their operational efficiency:
‘We run weekly reports based on the Intouch data to review and feedback on utilisation and OEE – we have a set of targets to achieve and for example, with utilisation we managed to improve it by over 5% (less than 62% in the past, average of 67% since Intouch & new Intouch scheduling system implemented).
OEE has been improved massively on certain machines, such as BT Cells (NHS) machines from an average of 70% to an average of 90%+ since we implemented Intouch!’
Other Intouch features and functions regularly used by Talisman is the schedule for planning, monitoring cycle times, OEE as well as most importantly downtime and the reasons for it. They also monitor quantities produced against each works order and what scrap they have had.
Ewelina Skalska
Production Manager
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