Podcast: Making the Change From Manual to Digital Manufacturing Without Error

Meet the manufacturing innovators shaping the future of digital production: Ryan Kuhlenbeck and Greg Whitt. As the co-founder and CEO of Pico MES, Kuhlenbeck brings a wealth of experience from automotive giants like General Motors and Tesla, where he witnessed firsthand the challenges posed by the manufacturing digital divide. Whitt, on the other hand, serves as a process improvement engineer at MORryde, a leading manufacturer of motorhome and towable products, where he constantly seeks ways to enhance operational value.

These industry experts recently shared their insights at IndustryWeek’s Operations Leadership Summit, participating in a panel titled "Mid-Sized Auto Factory Adopts Digital Assembly for Error-Proofing". Their discussion centered on guiding medium-sized factories through the crucial transition from manual to digital manufacturing processes, with a focus on shop floor innovations. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, join host Scott Achelpohl, Smart Industry's managing editor, as he presents the most compelling audience questions and expert responses from this session.

Below is an excerpt from the transcript:

So, for us, a lot of the starting points, when we head into the shop floor, are just managing the chaos. You've got people, machines, tools, all kinds of different things that are all happening at the same time and have to work in perfect harmony to not make a mistake, to produce with quality, but also produce efficiently, price point wise, and then make the company competitive. Everything from simple things like scanners and printers all the way up to DC nutrunners and all kinds of air tools and things in between exist in all of our factories, at least on the assembly side. So, the key that we kind of recognize in the world is it's pretty rare to have a 3%, 5%, or 10% improvement opportunity. I believe that most opportunities are actually small, and you need to get a lot of them to really move the needle. So, it's a death-by-1,000-cuts problem. How do I get 30%? 1% at a time, day in and day out, whether it's helping an individual worker perform a task or a technology that's feeding back data into a continuous improvement loop that can solve a different issue. How do you manage your people, on the one side, whether it's training or just executing standard work? What about the equipment that they use that’s integrated into their days? And then the data that connects it all together, both to validate you built the thing, but also identify where the opportunities are for future improvements so that you're constantly growing.

So, when we're error-proofing systems or we're thinking about how do you balance people, tools, and data together, we use the common theme of error-proofing, but really it's all tied into that continuous improvement function. So, people need to know what it is they're supposed to do, and that can happen in a lot of ways. Often, you don't need a screen in front of them to manage that, but you need something that says, “This is what standard work looks like,” so that you can compare Bob and Jane when they're doing the same task but doing it at different rates. One of them is the right way and the other one might learn from that way. Or you might say that the standard work can be both, but one way or another, there has to be some amount of people tool in place. Then on the far side of it, when you get over to the data end, if you can't measure what you did, I like that last presentation where they said, “In the military, if it's important, figure out how to measure it.” There are easy ways to do that, and hard ways to do that, but having a system in place that does some of that automatically, whether it's time tracking or traceability data, it becomes really important to feed back into the other areas. And then tools are just opportunities to fix problems, to do things better. You don't have to spend a lot of money on tools nowadays. Our library at Pico, we have a no-code library of integrated tools. It's the largest one on the planet now. It's over 200 families of types of tools ranging from DC nutrunners all the way to air pressure transducers to validate that the airline on a pneumatic tool is at the right pressure, and everything in between can be added. And it's there to solve the problem. It's not there to have an engineered candy store, although that's effectively what it turns into. But each one of those things is an opportunity to improve. — Ryan Kuhlenbeck