Intro to FactoryOps: Real-time visibility for smarter operations

All right, so we'll go ahead and get this kicked off. Thank you everybody for joining and welcome. My name is Jacob Mieso. I'm a senior product marketing manager here at Guidewill. And I'm joined today by Kevin Irbino, our head of customer experience. Kevin, do you want to give the folks a quick intro? Sure.

Thanks, Jacob. First of all, thanks everybody for attending. My name is Kevin Eribino. I lead the customer experience team at Guide Wheel. I have about 15 years of manufacturing experience. I was a shop floor supervisor, manufacturing engineer for Westinghouse, for Asea Brown Bavari.

And really excited to kind of talk about the journey with Guide Wheel today.

Awesome. Thank you, Kevin. So, yeah, again everyone welcome and thank you for joining today's webinar Intro to Factory Ops. We're going to give a quick overview of how manufacturers can gain real time visibility into their factory operations. Kevin's going to speak to some of the reasons this has been challenging and difficult in the past. And we'll also give you guys some insights into how companies are already using Guide Wheel to unlock major efficiency gains. We're going to try to keep this to around 20 minutes or so, but before we dive in, I just want to get into some quick housekeeping items.

So this webinar is being recorded. So feel free to sit back, relax, enjoy the show. We will send a recording after the session. You can use the chat box to engage. So thank you all for already using that to kind of tell us where you're from. Please feel free to share your thoughts there. React throughout the session. If you do have any questions though, we ask that you would put them in the Q and A box. We have another colleague in the background that'll also help to answer some of those questions. But we will also reserve some time at the end. And there's also you have the ability to do a thumbs up on a question. So if you see a question that you would also like answered, please feel free to just do a thumbs up and that'll let us know that many people want to have that question answered as well.

And so here's a quick look at what we'll cover today. As mentioned, Kevin will speak to some of the hidden costs of factory blind spots, the inefficiencies and unknowns that can erode performance and profitability. Then we'll look at Guide wheel and our FactoryOps platform, how it's making real time visibility accessible for all. We'll also show how manufacturers are currently unlocking efficiency using these real time insights. We'll speak to some real world examples of what that looks like today in action. And finally, we'll give you some input into how you can take this path to smarter operations. Some of the next steps that are available to you today.

Without further ado, let's jump in. And Kevin, I'll pass it over to you.

Thanks, Jacob. So just before I get into this, I'm going to try to make this. I know it's not a conversation, but I'm trying to use a lot of examples because my experience with webinars is like the more we can dive into details and specifics without naming customer names, the more compelling it is. So if you have questions about that, as Jacob said, let us know in the chat.

We live in this world where you can check just about anything on your smartphone. You know, the weather, the score of the Carolina Hurricanes hockey game that I'm a big fan of any sports, and you can even start your car up with your phone.

So, so, you know, all of us in manufacturing ask the question, why can't we get the same, you know, instant, automated, smart, real time visibility into our factory floors? We have some of the most advanced technology out on our floors, both the machines and the supporting devices. Why can't we get this? It's a real challenge. We know how important it is to win the day and why can't we get the data and the support and the visibility to get there and know that we're doing well or behind for the day?

So. And why does it matter? Because those blind spots leave huge amounts of money on the table. We found from our experience with our customers, about 30% of margins lost to controllable downtime. You just need to know what it is and look at your Pareto and see where the biggest areas of opportunity are. 25 to 42 hours of lost production time per month. You know, that's, that's obviously valuable time. If you can reclaim it, you can, you know, get more product out the door. You can make your schedule more flexible. And then the 35 to 60% average OE before guide wheel, you know, we, most of us use OEE as a measure for our machines, for our areas, for our plants. And there's a huge opportunity to get better, especially around runtime, especially around.

You.

Know, production and obviously with quality.

So kind of reduced it down. And this is a, this is a complex problem we're trying to solve, but reducing it down to four areas of opportunity. And I'll just kind of share some of our experiences in these. So unnecessary capex One of the, one of the great things about having machine visibility is, you know, it may be very different than what you're expecting or it may be very different than what your experience is. We've had customers that have installed Guide Wheel and you know, their goal before Guide Wheel was to add more machines. They thought they were running certain machines, certain lines at around 80%.

Utilization and they were looking forward to spending money and trying to justify money for new machines. They got Guide wheel and the surprise they got was their utilization was not 80% for that area, it was more like less than 10%. So I know that's hard to believe, but a huge difference in what you believe to be true versus the reality is something that we see pretty often. So in that case they're able to avoid a capex spend that they didn't need to make. They got more out of their existing equipment, which is, you know, I think a goal that all of us have around lost revenue opportunities. This one's, this one's pretty obvious. If you're sold out and you're looking to make more to fill orders, you can, you know, having the visibility, you know, reducing some of the downtime can unlock the ability to get this new business and you know, spread the asset over the, make it a corporate asset and amortize it. We've had customers obviously sell more and get that pure margin out of being able to up the production numbers. We've also had customers that, that maybe weren't sold out and just had the improved flexibility of their production schedule. So you know, one customer in particular was able to reduce their lead times by two weeks just by having this extra capacity to be able to move skus around and resources on the lost talent opportunity. This one might be, might feel a little less direct to technology, but I bet there's not a person in the room that isn't struggling with this problem of either finding talent or retaining talent. There's some research that said there's about half a million open jobs right now in manufacturing. 75% of North American executives have resourcing people resourcing as one of their top three issues. This is something we've all struggled with and you know, technology can really be a competitive advantage here. Selling your opportunity is something that, you know, we all enjoy. You know, making the products that everybody uses. But also having it technology enabled, having it be a forward thinking environment really does make a difference, especially with folks that are entering into the manufacturing world for the first time. And then finally the higher waste and costs, you know, guidewheel started as a company that was very concerned and continues to be concerned about sustainability and energy.

Sustainability.

We've had customers that have just used the energy information they get from Guidewheel to have over $700,000 in annual savings. And it may sound simple, but just knowing what machines to turn off because they're not being utilized can have huge impact. That customer also saw a 16% improvement in production efficiency. So those that have just used the energy information they get from Guide Wheel to have this kind of, you know, they also used it on the other side of the fence to justify more capex. So if your compressors and chillers are constantly failing, there's a cost to that and spending money, sometimes it's the right answer and Guide Wheel can really help you justify that. In this particular case that I'm talking about, they saw about a six month.

ROI payback on that, on that investment. So almost immediately, and then the last element about this is, you know, energy can be a really expensive utility. And this customer went from paying penalties because they were using so much energy to actually getting credits on their bills because they were now so much more energy efficient. So these are all very tactical, specific bottom line driving benefits that we can see from just having more visibility and knowing where to direct the efforts.

Jason, I'm going to hand it back to you. We're going to get into Guide Wheel a bit.

Yeah, thanks Kevin.

As Kevin mentioned, actually originally Guide Wheel started out of around a focus of energy efficiency and sustainability. But what we did was we listened to our customers and customer feedback is super critical for us. And our customers actually quickly showed us something really powerful that they were using a lot of the data that we had provided, not just for managing energy, but to understand how their machines were performing. So Guidewill was now we're actually able to eliminate those blind spots, making real time visibility simple, scalable and accessible. And those customers were telling us that the visibility we are providing was something like they never had before. It was really helping them to uncover a lot of those blind spots that Kevin was talking about identifying downtime and being able to make better decisions in real time. So we listened to that feedback, we pivoted and we began building for this bigger opportunity around real time operational visibility. And so that's really how factoryops was born. And it's not just about monitoring machines. What we're really trying to do here is provide that intelligent factory operations, but without requiring all of your time or all of your budget and really revealing the opportunities that are already inside within your operations. So if you want to know how it works, we will dive into a little bit closer of a look into how FactoryOps provides that real time layer of insight without disruption. And just wanted to give a quick shout out here to Lauren Dunford, that's our CEO, and Weston McBride, our CTO and our two co founders here at Guide Wheel.

So the factory house platform is built on a pretty basic and simple truth that every machine, regardless of its make or its model, they all use electricity. And so instead of relying on complicated integrations or inexpensive retrofit of machines, we simply clip a sensor, a CT sensor, onto the power draw. So you can kind of think of it like a Fitbit for a factory. It's reading the electrical heartbeat of that machine to tell us when a machine's running, when it's idle, how it's performing and doing all of that in real time. And so the result of that is providing that instant visibility without having to sort of rip and replace systems or wait on large month long deployments. So one of our favorite quotes was a plant director who said that it took actually just 40 minutes to get set up for the whole system and they were able to start identifying inefficiencies and downtime reasons. That fast and frictionless setup is a big reason why teams can start improving immediately with factory ops.

By simply reading that power draw, we're able to provide again that, that visibility across your factory floor. You can with this data, optimize for uptime, as Kevin mentioned, improving oee driving higher throughput and again without the disruption of those systems, without the deployment, long deployments, IT headaches, etc. One of our customers at GM put it as mentioned, the 40 minutes to get the whole system set up. It was beautiful.

And here we'll see and we'll actually show it in a demo, a short demo, but here we can see sort of the cycles and what that looks like in real time with the FactoryOps platform.

So once it's up and running, what does this enable you to do? And again, it's not just monitoring your machines, but driving measurable results. And this is some of the things that Kevin talked about already. So increasing production from your existing assets, really helping you to optimize for those things that are going to help you to produce more and have a positive impact on your bottom line. Really we understand that the teams in these factories are super, super important. And so we're really there to help provide technology to unlock the productivity that's already within your teams, helping them to improve their communications, improve and Fit better decisions, looking at things like predictive maintenance, detecting anomalies, and really helping to monitor machine behavior before things escalate. And as Kevin mentioned, again, reducing energy consumption. So instead of having.

These huge amounts of energy necessary to produce, we can actually flip that and where you're actually able to get credits. So really there's a plethora of different advantages that comes from getting this type of real time insight and visibility.

I'm not going to bore you with all the different things that are listed here, but I just really want to highlight that often when people hear about this approach that we have with the CT sensors, they may think of it as just seeing whether a machine is on or off, but it actually can deliver much more than that. And Kevin, maybe if you want to speak to this, I think maybe you might have a little bit extra color here. But I really want to just kind of emphasize that it's much more than just tracking kind of on and off stages for the customers.

Yeah, I mean we kind of live by a code here where it's nice to know if your machine is running, but what you really want to know is whether your machine is producing and not, for instance, dry cycling. So it's really about production. So we can tell a lot through cycles, we can count your production through cycles. We have AI enhanced methods that help with that. We have production module that we can actually get all your production schedule into the system. And we'll be able to match up SKUs with machines so we know what the cycle standards are, for instance, without going into a lot of detail. The other thing I'll mention is we monitor all kinds of conditions. CTs are how we started, but we currently can handle temperature, pressure, humidity, we can do production counts. So it's really pretty much anything you can think of that you need to count or measure to get to the ultimate production number we can do.

Awesome, thanks. Kevin and I just wanted to jump right into a quick demo of what this looks like within the guidewell platform. So give me one second and let me get this.

Get the right page showing here. Perfect. So what we'll see here is on our, this would be considered our uptime view and we're looking at specifically a blow molder here. So in this view we're able to see in green that that's indicating uptime, yellow is indicating idle time, red is indicating downtime, and purple for planned maintenance or planned downtime. So the cool thing about too is we're actually able to look at how things are tagged. So for instance, this is just one short example of we'll see here that there was a planned maintenance reason for this downtime. But for the couple hours after that we're also seeing that there was some electrical motor causing this blow motor to be down. Again, electrical motor issue. And that led to a few hours of additional downtime. So one example of how you might be able to use this is let's say you had a new maintenance tech who was working on this machine. They had this planned maintenance downtime, but for some reason following that, there was also an electrical motor that was causing some additional downtime. So this would provide you some insight into, okay, maybe this new maintenance type of ours may need some additional training, may need some additional learning, because for whatever reason this led to some additional unforeseen downtime. And so this is just an additional layer of being able to identify the reasons behind the downtime and again, really to help empower your team in a way that is going to be helpful and improve, as Kevin mentioned, the amount that you're able to produce. And there's a bunch of other ways that we're able to tag and view the downtime reason. So it could be things like changeovers, it could be things like jams, et cetera. No operator was there at that time. So really you can think of this as sort of everything that's happening within that day. So the goal really is to help you win the day, win the shift, and again, just really to help improve the overall efficiency of your operations and the production that you're able to produce within your operations. So I'll quickly go back into our presentation to go through this type of ours. May need some additional training, may need some additional learning because some examples of how this is being used in the real world.

So one of our customers is a company called Tailored Bottling Solutions and they're a great example of how factory ops can deliver value really quickly. They're a food and beverage manufacturer, they have two facilities and like many of companies in this sort of mid sized space, they were running into downtime issues but they didn't have the clear data to understand why that was happening. So they were able to install in under a day and almost immediately they were able to identify what was driving those inefficiencies. This level of visibility helped them to really justify some capex investments and to start really pinpointing and resolving the biggest issues that were happening on the floor. And what was really powerful here was that widespread adoption. So it wasn't just a couple of folks, but really operators Supervisors and leadership were all able to use Guide Wheel in their unique use cases and able to track and improve performance for the various jobs to be done that they had. This ended up leading to a 40% reduction in operations related downtime in just six months. And that was the kind of impact that shows up not just in the performance metrics, but obviously in production and in profitability and customer satisfaction. And again, just aligning across the different teams that are involved with the operations at this facility. So this is just one example of how it's happened, how it happened and how it's been implemented at a smaller company. And Kevin, I'd love to pass it over to you to speak through how we've seen it at a larger company with Pretium.

Yeah, thanks, Jacob. So Guide Wheel is currently installed in all 25 plants of Pretium's footprint. So it's an enterprise solution.

They saw an immediate 15% improvement in machine utilization in three months. Really the story is just driven by visibility.

The company had an initiative to tag their downtime that was an important requirement of each plant. It was almost like a friendly competition to see who could tagged the most of the issues that come up on that heartbeat that Jacob showed.

Most of the facilities are tagging anywhere from 95 to 100% of those issues. So they're getting a really complete picture of where their downtime is and that's enabling them to solve those issues.