OEE: Overall Equipment Effectiveness in Industry 4.0
The real value of OEE comes from interpreting the losses incurred due to availability, performance, or quality. By focusing on these losses, and more importantly, by taking action to reduce these losses, your OEE score will naturally improve. For factories to enjoy optimal OEE, device connectivity is essential in order to collect precise data. Several solutions are available for factories to upgrade their production technology in order to improve the availability and performance rates of their equipment as well as their quality output.
AVAILABILITY: UNDERSTANDING MACHINE STATUS TO REDUCE DOWNTIME AND IMPROVE NETWORK PERFORMANCE
Reducing Machine Downtime: Collecting data for predictive maintenance
During production, machines generate different types of data, such as machine vibration, motor current, and coolant level. Based on this data, machine maintenance engineers schedule maintenance tasks (predictive maintenance) to avoid any unexpected machine downtime. However, the data presents itself in different forms. One is streaming data, which is transmitted in big volumes and requires preprocessing before it is sent to a back-end system. The other is status data, which is transmitted in small volumes and via a transparent method without any preprocessing. Thus, the system has to use different methods to collect both status and streaming data. For status data, the best way is to use transparent data collection. For streaming data, the best way is to use front-end data processing to downsize the data to provide valuable information to the back-end system. Downsizing is necessary because there will be too much streaming data to transfer all the raw data to a back-end system.
| Front-End Data Processing | Transparent Data Collection | |
|---|---|---|
| Data Format | Complex | Simple |
| Local Response | Yes | No |
| Data Size | Large | Small |
| Standard Protocol | Depends | Yes |
Building network infrastructure to maximize uptime
Most PLC networks rely on the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) for multicast transmissions. For example, implicit communications, usually used to check the availability of systems that connect PLCs and devices, are based on multicast.
Together with Moxa’s Turbo Ring solution, Moxa offers its pioneering technology, V-ON, which enables a physical network, unicast traffic, and multicast traffic to recover within milliseconds when there is a failure on a network. V-ON technology ensures that the system keeps running and maximizes productivity.
Real-Time Notifications to Reduce System Downtime
In addition, Moxa’s pioneering industrial network management mobile application, MXview ToGo, provides real-time notifications to reduce system downtime. It sends real-time notifications about the network status, provides the ability to check detailed information right away, and also provides an easy-to-use device-locating function to help field engineers find the right device in a network.
- Real-time notifications
- Network status check
- Easy device mapping
PERFORMANCE: REDUCING THE CHANGEOVER TIME TO INCREASE THE PRODUCTIVITY OF MACHINES OR OPERATORS
Using reliable on-chip flow-control data transmission increases productivity
High customization is a significant value of Industry 4.0, prompting regular changes in the programming of computer numerical control (CNC) machines. However, because a CNC buffer is limited, and programs are relatively big, CNC machines always take a long time to download new programs. Therefore, the stability of the data transfer is very important, especially in old machines with serial interfaces. A serial-to-Ethernet device server with a flow-control feature is normally used to stop incoming data to prevent data drop; otherwise, the dropped data has to be resent. Spending more time on data transfers means less manufacturing time.
With Moxa’s on-chip flow-control feature, Moxa’s device servers (NPort) are able to process the stoppage (Xoff) directly from a UART, which eliminates data loss when a program is changed.
Intelligent Supervisor Meets Various Demands for Mixed-Model Production
Mixed-model production entails a high degree of variation that includes thousands of different options and combinations to produce customer-specified components and multiple product types on the same assembly line. To increase the productivity of machines and operators, Moxa’s ioPAC 8500 programmable controller helps categorize the production tasks, ensuring that the task sequence can be automatically retrieved from an MES (Manufacturing Execution System). For example, tools are identified by an RFID tag, and an ioPAC retrieves the production method from the system and notifies all the relevant machines via an industrial protocol, such as Modbus. The production information is then sent back to the MES via an IT protocol.
QUALITY: ACHIEVING ZERO DEFECTS AND PROVIDING EARLY WARNINGS
Detect Defective Products and Send an Early Warning
Measurements and calibrations are important for CNC-machine applications. Production data is the key to help you understand the situation. Two types of data are applicable: stable data (on/off status and the volumes of data are small) and temporary data (generated over short periods and needs to be recorded without missing any parts).The generation of temporary data indicates that production quality is being affected. Therefore, it is important to collect the data precisely.
Moxa provides a ruggedly designed IIoT data gateway to help customers collect precise data in harsh environments so that the line manager stays up-to-date with regard to the status of all devices in the field. Moreover, the ioPAC uses an open platform, and customers can implement their program to do data preprocessing in order to retrieve valuable information for predictive maintenance from raw data and reduce traffic between the IIoT gateways and back-end servers. The ioPAC also provides Azure cloud-ready connectivity. Customers can push their data to the Azure cloud and leverage third-party software to do data mining or data analysis.