Manufacturing Reliability and Cost Improvements through Data Analytics: An Industry Case Study

Abstract

Industry has entered a new age of industrial change which is revolutionising how products are manufactured. Driving this industry change are newly developing digital technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, advanced analytics and the industrial internet. This convergence of technology and manufacturing is driving the digital transformation of every industrial segment from operations to logistics, and from aeronautics to retail product manufacture. The technology advances evident from Industry 4.0 will result in industry disruption and build competitive advantages for the organisations who can master the technologies in their manufacturing processes. However, organisations are struggling to develop a tactical methodology to introduce these technologies while simultaneously transforming their organisation cultures and organisations and maximising the benefits. One of the key reasons for the Fourth Industrial Revolution called Industry 4.0 is the need to strengthen the competitiveness of Western European economies, which as a result of the progressing globalization process and rising labor and business costs [1]. A key benefit of the introduction of Industry 4.0 initiatives in a manufacturing plant is to help overcome current operations management limitations, such as, the lack of knowledge on how the process is performing at a specific point in time. This paper will investigate the impact of deploying a range of Industry 4.0 technologies to access machine and operations performance data, to improve equipment reliability and to reduce the costs associated with the maintenance of equipment. With the introduction of the operational data analytics as a result of data extraction from manufacturing equipment, along with integrating other data sources, the business has realised improvements in key metrics like OTIF (On Time in Full), OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), MTTR (Mean Time to Return), CuC (Consumable Unit Cost), and Lead Time. This paper discusses this project and the results obtained at Zimmer Biomet while also discussing the research carried out for ZOML to begin its journey on manufacturing digitalisation.

The paper starts with a background in Industry 4.0. The next section provides a background on the company where the problem statement and project have come from with some detail on their digitalisation journey. The following section details the problem and the project that the research is derived from and the final section is in relation to the results of the research and the project.