The quest for medical product perfection
John Christiano, vice president of extrusion technology, Davis-Standard, highlights how digital transformation is used to make jobs easier.
Medical product manufacturing is a tough job; persistent timelines, exacting quality standards, equipment performance, tighter margins, and staffing shortages are just a few things piled on the plate.
So how to make your job easier? The answer lies in reliable technology and the forward-thinking potential of digital transformation. Digitalisation and “smart factory” technology may already be integrated into the operation. If you are still researching the possibilities, here are some insights to help take the next step.
Let’s examine five areas that impact your daily operation:
1. Product Quality
It is impossible for a human to track every item on a production line and understand the interactions between key components of the system and overall product quality. By using digital transformation and cloud-based analytics, you can avoid being overwhelmed by large amounts of incoming data and hone in on factors that matter the most.
Awareness alerts, such as those in figure 1, deliver the simplified visual your team needs to make informed decisions. No more hunting around through massive lists and wasting precious time. The necessary data is wrapped up into a tidy package and accessible at a glance.
How is this possible? The real-time monitoring that occurs with digital transformation is like having your own personal artificial intelligence agent. Your process technicians, maintenance, engineering, and management teams can all see the current status of the operation to understand what is going well and what needs to be modified. Visual details concerning quality factors such as OD (outer diameter), WT (wall thickness), and ID (inner diameter) are available during the production run.
2. Productivity
It’s no secret that more uptime and greater knowledge leads to production line system readiness. Stopping mid-run is not an option. Task maintenance features allow you to receive regular reminders generated by the system based on calendar, run-time and on-demand criteria. Digitalisation captures data created by process and equipment experts to summarise factors needed to operate at maximum efficiency per OEM specifications. Figure 2 demonstrates what this looks like, highlighting areas that need immediate attention in red.
3. Safety
Your employees and your equipment must be in good health; no exceptions. With cloud-based technology utilising digitalisation, your operators have direct access to OEM safety procedures and protocols to keep them and your equipment in tip-top shape.
Is barrel heating causing trouble, or is it time for a barrel inspection? The operator can quickly access the exact information needed in that moment. See figures 3.1 and 3.2. Regardless of if your operator is highly experienced or new to the job, the information to perform the task is presented with visual aids. Step-by-step procedures and valuable reminders to ensure that equipment maintenance is done correctly and refers to appropriate safety protocols.
4. Employee Effectiveness
Finding skilled operators and keeping them is never easy. What was once handled by multiple operators, is now mostly likely being handled by one operator. This requires operators to multi-task like never before and digital transformation can support them.
Since production system analytics are continuously monitored, tracked and visually displayed, the whole story is available, not just a small part. In the example shown in Figure 4, this is categorised as good trending better, good trending worse, bad trending better, and bad trending worse. As a result, proactive steps can be taken to improve performance, and there’s instant gratification in seeing those actions take effect.
Furthermore, your entire team can gain access anywhere using a browser or mobile application. Accessibility can be tailored to each individual user, allowing system administrators to fully control the level of access and what data is visible to each user.
5. Time to Market
Your ability to get product out the door on time and on budget is a make-or-break situation. Production and delivery delays do not make for a pretty picture on your customer’s end. Understanding the “golden run” and how to achieve the best conditions over the long haul is critical.
With digital transformation, this process can become automatic. Production run information, including analytics performance parameters and KPIs (Key Product Indicators), illuminate ideal conditions specific to your process and equipment. The example in figure 5 presents the “golden run optimisation toolbox.” This guides your team in selecting the best line conditions to maximise performance on future production runs.
Finally, the overall benefit of digital transformation can be summarised in figure 6.
Operational equipment effectiveness (OEE), production time availability, product quality, and line productivity are no longer a mystery. Your experience and innovation have officially been merged with cloud-based analytics to give you a path to perfection. The data is already interpreted and ready for you as you make informed decisions that deliver positive projected outcomes. No more “running to failure” using post-failure analysis. Instead, it’s all about looking ahead and focusing on what matters most, your customers.