Situation:

To remain competitive in their industry, a leading force transducer manufacturer faced a need to increase production but was unwilling to move to or open new facilities unless absolutely necessary. Instead, the management sought to explore other possibilities.

Target:

Determine what alternatives to construction of larger or supplementary manufacturing sites or moving the business into larger existing sites might be feasible, lower cost, or potentially quicker to instantiate.

Plan:

Investigation of the existing operations identified several possible approaches to enhancing the firm’s production capabilities. Of these options, the ROI analysis of the various options indicated that the most cost-effective approach would be through the introduction of automated test data collection and analysis, aimed at the collection of production test and engineering data at existing testing operations.

Result:

Following detailed analysis of the data and operational requirements, a prototype system was developed and delivered for testing. Initial results from the prototype demonstrated a 100% increase in production and helped identify several potential enhancements to the system. Upon implementation of these enhancements, two additional systems were built and deployed to the company’s manufacturing operation. Live use of these systems indicated a tripling of original production capabilities, whereupon seven additional systems were contracted for and delivered. The ten total systems not only maintained the 300% increase in production across the entire factory, but also enabled a significant reduction in paper-based data collection and manual archiving while eliminating the need to construct new facilities or move the production site.