Ricaurte Precision has been helping World Leading Aerospace, Medical Device and Technology manufacturers solve their precision machining (CNC) challenges for over 30 years. Ricaurte Precision Inc. is equipped with the expertise and technology to meet your On Time Delivery and Quality requirements. Our Orange County, California facilities include 5-Axis Mills, Live Tooling Lathes, Swiss Screwand Wire EDM technologies. We offer 24-7 light out automated fabrication. We fabricate over 300 different parts per month in a wide range of metals and plastics with tolerances of +/- .0002”. Ricaurte precision has worked with MATA to implement productivity monitoring especially for lights out operations and high-value jobs.
Challenges
GOAL – Integrate machine monitoring with ERP data to provide live productivity monitoring, bottleneck analysis, and job delay predictions.
RISK – Implementing new technology always comes with risks. The main focus is on how to measure and summarize shop floor data and into actionable data. More importantly, we need to make sure that Hernan Ricaurte, Ricaurte Precision’s president, and his vision of using digital transformation and AI to improve efficiency and profitability receives support from the shop floor.
EXPECTATIONS – We set expectations before we started any collaboration. These are the goals we established after detailed discussions:
- The system needs to be able to monitor the shop floor productivity 24-7.
- Real-time alerts must be sent to the manager when machines are idle.
- Company owner receives utilization % alerts when they are lower than a given threshold.
Approaches
Step 1. Install Mata’s machine monitoring solution. This allows for the most direct measure on the shop floor production. The shop floor consists of equipment brands that can all support MTConnect. For the machines with FANUC controllers, we use our FANUC adaptor to make the machines MTConnect compatible. For the machines that require proprietary drivers, we install vibration sensors instead to save the cost.
Step 2. Discuss the monitoring results, capability, and features with the company owner and shop floor manager. Design customized dashboard – To make sure the live monitoring system provides exactly what Hernan has in mind to maintain or increase Ricaurte Precision’ competitiveness is of utter importance to us. Also, we needed to make sure that the dashboard summarizes the live performance in ways that the management can get the desired information right away and be alerted immediately when there’s an unexpected downtime.
Step 3 – Shop floor mentality change – make efficiency data available and transparent to everyone on the shop floor. It’s important for the machinists and management to monitor the same productivity data that can be readily available and real-time. Mata’s user app serves this purpose well especially with real-time email/sms alerts.
Step 4 – Integrate with Shoptech E2. Ricaurte Precision use Shoptech E2 as their ERP. It’s important to combine machine monitoring results with the ERP data to provide data such as OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) or job-level efficeincy.
Results
2X utilization + 6X part count = 3X Productivity (part/minute). When we fully implemented the monitoring system and ERP integration, Ricaurte Precision was in the phase of ramping up production for large incoming orders. Naturally, the equipment utilization goes up without the need for monitoring. However, thanks to the digitization and mentality shift, we are able to measure exactly how much the utilization goes up and how it affects the actual productivity – how much time manufacturing a part takes.
Because we are seeing the equipment utilization increase to 200% and part count increase to 600%, we know that within 30 days, each part is manufactured 3X faster. This reveals that Ricaurte Precision was not only able to increase production hours, but also make the hours uses more efficiently as well.
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