Kwikset uses RSSql on Assembly Operations
Kwikset Corporation, a Black & Decker company, is the largest manufacturer of residential locksets in the US. Its use of PLC, PC, and software technologies demonstrate the value of integrating the plant floor with the rest of the enterprise.
"Our goal was to put a new manufacturing culture in place for Kwikset," explained Chris Werner, Kwikset Corporation plant manager. "The focus of the new site was on process integration, automation where it made sense, and on developing a data acquisition system driven by performance of the process."
When the Waynesboro facility first started production in January 1997, the installed control system consisted of a mix of more than 70 Allen-Bradley programmable controllers on the plant floor linked via three established network lines. To collect trend data, shift supervisors would manually gather figures such as parts in and out, downtime, and part efficiency from each individual machine. The information wasn't real-time and couldn't always be considered accurate or up-to-date. Machine data wouldn't be unavailable until 24 hours later, during which time problems were missed, and scrap or downtime could build.
One of the first tasks at the new facility was to team Kwikset's information systems specialist, Karla Gibson, with the plant's control engineer, Leslie Cooper. Together, they set three goals for the new data acquisition system - Kwikset wanted immediate access to data from the plant floor, they wanted a system that could simply integrate with the existing one, and they wanted to be sure staff could easily adapt with minor training.
"As a new facility, we started out in an experimentation mode, looking at a series of options starting with which operating system to adopt," explained Gibson. "We looked at our needs from an IS standpoint, in terms of the flexibility we wanted, the data we might need, and how we would want to use it."
At the same time, Cooper considered needs from a controls standpoint. "Reliability is a top priority for us in controls," he said. "Each discrete assembly operation hinges on the success of several others, so we couldn't sacrifice reliability for the sake of information sharing."
The company's newest facility in Waynesboro, Georgia, US, has a data acquisition system called OPTIMIS (Online Performance Tracking and Improvement Information System) linked by Rockwell Software acquisition software, HMI software and the Allen-Bradley SoftLogix5 software-based controller. The system allows plant and office floor access to real-time data from any of the facility's manufacturing operations - ensuring accurate production tracking, enhanced machine downtime analysis capabilities and, ultimately, a better quality product.