Page 22 - MetalForming July 2017

Controls: Don’t Disable!
millions of dollars tied into their press lines, shut down these systems. After recalls, he notes, some of these man- ufacturers blamed the recalls on not following their own quality proce- dures, i.e., shutting down monitoring functions.
“Manufacturers are not using the equipment they have,” Phillips says. “In one plant, every tonnage monitor on every press was disabled. Too often, a stamper or fabricator will say, ‘We’ve incorporated Lean and Six Sigma, so we’re done.’ But that fact is, you are never done. You have to keep working on it to continuously improve. The same is true in monitoring and data gathering.”
As business cycles fluctuate, so, too, does attention paid to monitoring and data gathering by manufacturers.
“When business is down, they’ll get rid of aspects that don’t show a true ROI from a production standpoint,” says Phillips. “You’ll see engineers assigned to Lean or Six Sigma trans- ferred out while these teams are aban- doned, with the idea that they’ll be res- urrected when things pick up, but that never seems to happen. We see the same with tonnage monitors, for instance. Not using the tools available is an alarming situation.”
Don’t Wait for Pain
The problem? “People do not react to pleasure, they wait for that moment of pain,” Phillips says. “It happens over time. Presses keep pounding to meet production needs. When production increases, downtime for scheduled maintenance is sacrificed. Manufac- turers will say that they don’t have the time for proper maintenance of machinery. If maintenance personnel come around to take down a press or other equipment for regular mainte- nance, production won’t allow it. It is accepted that production always trumps maintenance. Of course you can wait, but at a certain point, when dies are crashing and quality nosedives, waiting no longer is an option. At this point maintenance is unplanned, time-inten- sive and costly.”
Big-Time Assistance for Operators
Part of the problem, in Phillips’ view, stems from the ongoing skills challenge as metalformers and fabricators seek to fill positions with qualified appli- cants and retain skilled workers.
“Whether through a lack of skills or a lack of training once they are hired, sometimes employees are not properly prepared for the things they need to do,” he says.
Where controls providers and other suppliers to the industry can help is by making equipment operation and monitoring as intuitive as possible.
“We see operators hunting and pecking at user interfaces to find the menus and pages they’re looking for,” says Phillips. “Back in the 1970s and ’80s, controls may have had indicator lights and, at best, a short one- or two- line display describing equipment sta- tus. A light would indicate an e-stop, for example, and then a maintenance technician would arrive to troubleshoot and, after a time discover that air pres- sure had not been turned back after machine shutoff, or a die block had not been plugged back in after a die change. Now, controls manufacturers provide prompts that, if a press or piece of equipment is not running, indicate where the problem is and here’s what must be done: ‘Lubrication-oil level is low.’ ‘Turn the lubrication motor on.’ ‘Turn the air pressure on.’ Whatever that may be, controls now alert oper- ators and take them step-by-step through a sequence to satisfy the alert condition.”
No need for a time-consuming once- over by the maintenance department.
“Controls still must evolve to become more intuitive, to provide users with tools to assist in making employ- ees and processes as efficient and pro- ductive as possible,” Phillips says. “Con- trols now can walk the operator through a process and provide usable information. A problem with counter- balance? The control is specific to the input for the counterbalance, perhaps a low reading on a pressure switch, which indicates a problem with the air
pressure itself or an incorrect pressure setting. The control recognizes situations, and prompts and advises accordingly. This is a good example of how controls have become more intuitive and now incorporate prompting levels that help inexperienced operators find solutions. But we need to keep moving forward.”
Besides providing assistance on the shop floor with improved messaging and prompting capabilities, controls act on monitoring functions by keeping management informed, another reason why manufacturers should not disable monitoring, according to Phillips.
“Networking systems communicate when tonnage monitoring or die-pro- tection functions, for instance, are dis- abled or turned off,” he says. “This assists with troubleshooting. If a die crashes, you’ll know that tonnage mon- itoring was disabled due to overloading conditions. The solution was to ignore the problem as opposed to taking action to reduce the amount of tonnage required. Users can set up control sys- tems to prevent bypassing or disabling of monitoring functions in certain modes of operations. Here, disabling is prevented, or if it does occur, the equip- ment will not operate. Controls provide a system of checks and balances to take action and prevent future calamity.”
Keep Complex Lines Productive
The continued ascendancy of hot- stamping and servo-driven press lines, processes that add complexity by orders of magnitude despite their seemingly effortless performance when running optimally, further point to the need to deploy, and use, high-perfor- mance controls. With so many process inputs, controls increasingly crunch incoming data to monitor, protect and optimize performance of these lines, including complex ancillary pieces of equipment. Data gathering, and actions based on that data, are the purview of modern press controls. And, of course, controls work best when there’s data to be gathered. With that in mind, Phillips offers two words of advice: “Don’t disable!” MF
20 MetalForming/July 2017
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