Improved traceability in manufacturing
Moving manufacturing forward
To maintain efficiency in manufacturing, production lines must keep moving, no matter what. Bottlenecks in production immediately impact the output of your company. This causes delays in shipments and impacts your customers directly.
Manufacturing companies may experience two main bottlenecks:
1. Item tracking
2. Inefficient buffering of items between different production steps.
“For operations like ours, bottlenecks in the production line can cause major disruptions and are very costly.”
Never lose items again
Items stored in open racking are hard to track. Even when items are neatly stored and labelled there's no way to control who's keeping track of inventory. As soon as someone picks without registering it, your inventory is out of date.
The root cause of delays
These simple administrative errors might lead to larger problems such as missing out on crucial items due to outdated inventory. This could lead to delays in both delivery time and customer project timescales.
Traceability of (semi-) finished products
Keeping track of the different stages of a production process is difficult. The buffer between each production step is prone to errors due to human intervention. This is especially so if several stages of production work are carried out on the same machine with different settings, or if the FIFO method is applied, for which consistent first-in-first-out sequencing is imperative.
Storage | Consolidation & Buffering |
---|---|
Missing inventory Missing inventory | Difficult to track (semi-)finished products Difficult to track (semi-)finished products |
Manual tracking Manual tracking | Inefficient storage Inefficient storage |
Inefficient picking Inefficient picking | Taking up a lot of valuable space Taking up a lot of valuable space |
How to improve traceability?
Implementing WMS (Warehouse Management Software), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or MES (Manufacturing Execution Software) could be the first step to optimized traceability. However, software still requires human intervention for verification and could still lead to errors when the process is not strictly followed.
This is where goods-to-person solutions come in. Automated storage solutions can be used to store raw materials, (sub)assemblies or finished products.
Regain full control over your production
By automating processes in the warehouse, AZ Pneumatica now controls all the various stages of processing and preparation for distribution with extreme precision. By using ASRS for their inventory and pre-production buffer they have full traceability of materials and increased their loading and picking speed.
“Our picking speed has increased by 80% while picking errors have been reduced by 90%”
Benefits of automated storage solutions
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Improved traceability
Track items from start to finish
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Increased throughput
Faster picking and buffering
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Saving money
By maximizing efficiency
Improved traceability
Track items from start to finish
Increased throughput
Faster picking and buffering
Saving money
By maximizing efficiency