Intercim's FACTORYnet Benefits
- Streamlined process improvements
- Guaranteed data accuracy and integrity
- Automatic population of work order
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Honeywell Improves Quality with FACTORYnet
Intercim's FACTORYnet
Honeywell's Aerospace Electronic Systems provides advanced electronics and avionics for military
aircraft, defense and space systems, and large and regional air transport, including commercial and regional airlines. AES produces communication, navigation, flight control and management,
and weather radar systems. When Honeywell set out to reduce defects, improve product quality, increase customer ratings based on corrective and preventive
actions, and have a system of real-time data collection and harvesting, the company selected Intercim's FACTORYnet as its solution.
A commercial off-the-shelf solution set, FACTORYnet assists companies in increasing their production throughput and reduces cycle time and production
costs. Key areas addressed by the Intercim solution include manufacturing intelligence, electronic work instructions, quality management, labor management,
material management, equipment management, manufacturing engineering and manufacturing intelligence. Intercim's FACTORYnet solution enables Honeywell to meet its customers' quality
management, Six Sigma, compliance and digitization requirements. "Intercim's professional services group demonstrated the best-in-class industry
knowledge of aerospace electronic processes, and their quality management system had the product depth and was the most configurable," says Tom Smith, director
of quality assurance and Six Sigma for Honeywell's Aerospace Electronic Systems. Honeywell was faced with the challenge of meeting demands and requirements
from both internal and external customers. The company's external customers required improvement in quality levels, more proactive management of Honeywell's
processes, a reduction in cycle times to support delivery schedules and a reduction in cost base for products over time.
At the same time, the company's internal customers demanded an improvement in data integrity, accuracy and timeliness, including real-time data entry, quality
data-entry enforcement and consistent quality-data descriptions, codes and symptoms. Internal customers were also looking for tools to proactively manage
processes, such as SPC capability for ATE systems data, online report capability, drill-down report capabilities for failure analysis, and troubleshooting aids for use in
reducing scrap and cycle times. The solution to meet Honeywell's needs included several Intercim components: FACTORYnet's Quality Data Collection, Decision Support workbench, and
Document Management and Control. QDC provides Honeywell with a data entry screen where a field can be automatically populated from a drop file. It also includes fields that require data
validation and eliminates variation in data reporting by simplifying the data entry. QDC's standard features consist of guaranteed data accuracy and integrity,
auto-triggered data entry on operation failures, automatic population of work order/unit standard information, standardized data entry using operator-friendly
drop-down menus, use of link lists to reduce code selections, automated data entry error checking and validation, and enforced business rules.
Once the data has been entered, DSW allows Honeywell to efficiently make proactive decisions. It transforms the production data into eContent--reusable and
recoverable information. Honeywell can then specify the information it needs to support critical business decisions. DSW automatically delivers information to the
people who need it and allows Honeywell to choose the most useful format for delivering that information. In addition, Honeywell was able to create a Web page for the access, scheduling
and distribution of reports. DSW provides Honeywell with quality and administrative data such as a work-in-progress summary. Moreover, DSW
provides Honeywell with drill-down reports, allowing the company to manipulate the data in every way possible. The standard features of DSW allow for a cost-effective method for sharing
enterprise data with executives, managers and users, an elimination of nonvalue-added tasks and a decrease of the time and cost required for report
regeneration. DSW also provides quality, manufacturing and compliance status reports, and provides cycle time, as-built, genealogy, manufacturing bottlenecks,
process capability and many other reports. Additionally, it provides information about manufacturing flow, scrap reduction, resource utilization, labor utilization,
customer satisfaction and supply chain management. And with DMC, Honeywell has the ability to attach action status reports to a shop
order, allowing technicians to view information in real time. As a result, Honeywell can now look at a particular part and see its history from defects to tests.
"Our vision of a quality data collection system is now a reality, and better business decisions are being made because of FACTORYnet," says Ed Pries, quality
assurance and MES project manager. "In just three short months, we reduced cycle times by 25 percent, reduced scrap by 65 percent, increased data integrity and
accuracy by more than 92 percent, reduced shipping inspection rejects by 85 percent and provided access to online reporting for all users." |
