Founded in April 1997, the company is mainly engaged in the sales of high-quality tool and die steel based on special steel, vacuum heat treatment, nitriding, sulfurizing and nitriding of die steel (Foshan Dingfeng Rijia), parts vacuum heat treatment, parts processing, mold processing, stamping template processing, new material development, mold life improvement program and other services. Because the company's products are made of Datong special steel, which is recognized by the world as a high-quality special steel, the products are also recognized by the market, not only for Japanese-funded enterprises, but also to more than 1,000 enterprises such as Chinese (Chinese mainland), Taiwan-funded (Taiwan), new (Singapore), Hong Kong (Hong Kong) and so on. For a long time, it has won wide acclaim with good reputation and reliable quality. The company has always been "attaching importance to customers" as its important business philosophy.

With the expansion of business, the company is also inevitable that there are some common pain points in manufacturing enterprises: small batches, a variety of categories, and due to the particularity of the product, an order may have only one product, and more than N orders are changed in a day during the production process, and the relevant documents of each order need to be filled in manually, and then manually entered into the system afterwards. In addition, the product characteristics also determine that the operation of warehousing and requisition of returned materials is relatively complex, and the existing system cannot meet the requirements of use. Relying on manual work, not only the workload is large, but also the manual input is inaccurate and inconvenient to manage.

After actually understanding the pain points of his company, our company has formulated a relevant plan for his company, according to its various types of small batch industry characteristics, first select the most basic work order management and material traceability management to initially realize the transparency of workshop information, and gradually improve the implementation of the plan;

In order to facilitate management, the company has also added the Kanban function, which can see the completion of the workshop order in real time, can accurately and quickly transmit the order information and the required material information, and avoid the omission of information transmission; Kanban can also quickly and directly understand the factory when the customer visits, so that the customer can leave a deep impression after the visit. To understand the production situation before the improvement, it is necessary to communicate with the planner, production line, warehouse and other departments, and after the improvement, the information can be seen at a glance, and the abnormal situation is highlighted. At the same time, the handheld PDA scanning equipment can follow the flow of materials to collect data in real time, from receiving materials to scanning codes out of the warehouse, including the warehousing of semi-finished products, etc., the process is operated through the handheld mobile data collection terminal, which can directly record material information, not limited by the site, flexible and convenient.

At the same time, because of the difference in the quantity of raw materials and the size and structure of the returned materials, the return of materials into storage is also a major pain point in its daily work, so the raw materials in and out of the warehouse, including the return of materials into the warehouse, have made a WMS warehouse management system, and the storage and storage locations of the raw materials are controlled, so as to make reasonable use of resources and shorten the time of materials and work-in-progress inventory.

In order to improve the flow speed of materials and work-in-progress, the transportation of materials and work-in-progress is required to fully adopt the AGV dispatching system for automatic transportation. Through the implementation of VLINK's AGV intelligent dispatching system, flexible scheduling and route optimization of AGV transportation can be realized, greatly improving the efficiency of logistics and achieving fast and accurate transportation. The route design designs three types of driving routes according to the site conditions: AGV normal driving area, AGV dynamic acceleration area, and AGV charging area, and guides the driving route of the car through the different functions of each node on the driving route.

However, in the actual use process, we have encountered the following new problems, so that some companies will be AGV shelved, or even directly abandoned: AGV can only perform a fixed line, if the map is adjusted, the map needs to be re-set to each AGV, the route can not be exhaustive, when the route is more complex, the setting and application of AGV will be limited; it cannot be integrated with the system, it cannot be associated with other systems; when there is a hardware problem with AGV, it can only be a stand-alone warning, and the management personnel can not know the status of AGV, so they can only wait for on-site notification; the stand-alone AGV, the current locationWhen entering the fork at the same time, it is easy to stop AGV because of waiting for each other, and it is difficult for two-way AGV to deal with the problem of conflict caused by the path that can only be driven by a single vehicle.

The AGV intelligent scheduling system can solve the problems that cannot be solved by a single AGV, and the map can be edited in the upper system. Adjustment, the map takes effect in real time, AGV does not need to be re-set, the path between any point can be calculated, and the application scenarios of AGV trolley can be greatly expanded; through monitoring, real-time recording of AGV related operation data, it is convenient to use big data to analyze the operation efficiency of AGV; the status information of the trolley can be transmitted to the system in real time, if there is early warning information, it can be timely notified to relevant personnel through the monitoring kanban or SMS (email) and other ways for timely processing; system control is carried out through the intersection, and the AGV traffic sequence is scheduled, which will not cause congestion; the system can be based on the task situationThrough the intelligent scheduling system monitoring, it can implement and understand the current location, status, and tasks performed by each AGV.

Because the product is die steel, so the raw materials for the AGV trolley load requirements are very high, at present there are a total of 5 AGV trolleys in the workshop, of which 4 are 500 kg load, one is 3 tons load. There are a total of 32 unloading points and 18 loading points in the workshop, in order to meet the point-to-point feeding, there need to be 32*18=576 lines. The route design designs three types of driving routes according to the site conditions: AGV normal driving area, AGV dynamic acceleration area, and AGV charging area, which not only ensures safety but also improves transportation efficiency. A total of 225 RFID stations were set up on site, and AGV trolleys guided the driving route through different functions of each node. In the process of driving, it can support the control of AGV to perform rotation and translation at the same time.

After the implementation of the functional module system such as shop floor data and material flow and track and trace, the following significant improvements can be seen through monitoring and data analysis:

1.    Transparency in the production process

The MES system monitors all manufacturing aspects of the factory in real time, including equipment status and production progress. The required data can be provided to Authorities in a timely manner. The sales department can see the order status in time, the purchasing department can know the inventory of materials in time, and the warehouse can adjust the batching information in time according to the order status.

1.    Improve logistics efficiency

Through the implementation of VLINK's AGV intelligent dispatching system, flexible scheduling and route optimization of AGV transportation can be realized, greatly improving the efficiency of logistics and achieving fast and accurate transportation.

When the AGV receives the task assigned by the system, it transports materials according to the instructions of different nodes on the route; at the same time, the upper dispatching system can determine the optimal route according to the real-time road condition information; in the factory, it also realizes different speed walking in different sections, which improves the logistics efficiency while ensuring safety. After the system runs for a period of time, the operation efficiency of logistics is greatly improved, and the logistics cost and manpower demand are greatly reduced

1.    Improve the labor efficiency of employees

The MES system can clarify the production tasks of employees, so that employees can accurately see their work tasks of the day, and the required materials, including the SOP and other guidance documents required in the process, so as to reduce the error rate of personnel;

1.    The production process is paperless

With the introduction of the MES system, the workshop documents have been completely paperless and electronically recorded, and are only printed when necessary. The transfer and recording of information in the workshop is entirely realized through the workshop client.

After seeing the actual effect, Rijia also hopes to gradually launch the machine data, tool management and other modules in the next step, hoping to calculate the manufacturing time of the entire production process through the MES system, and capture the actual value-added production and unplanned downtime, and use the equipment status statistics to find the impact events that account for 80% of the downtime, and formulate corresponding rectification measures (2:8 principle). Improve equipment utilization.