If you’re making greater than 600 guitars a day throughout two services, all from wooden — a fabric that Tyler Robertson, R&D engineer at Taylor Guitars, describes as “the trigger and the issue of all the things we do” — it helps to have reliable management techniques.
At Taylor’s El Cajon, Calif., facility, they produce greater than 100 guitars each day, whereas their Tecate, Mexico, manufacturing facility cranks out greater than 500 guitars in addition to instances, baggage and equipment for Taylor and different manufacturers.
With such important manufacturing targets and coping with variable core supplies, the problem dealing with Taylor was the way it may keep the artisan-level high quality it has lengthy been identified for on an industrial scale.
Confronting the knowledge silos downside
Quite a few applied sciences comparable to sensors, CNC machines and robotic buffing and portray stations assist Taylor Guitars produce giant portions of guitars day by day. Factored into this mixture of typical industrial automation instruments is an HVAC administration system that controls the corporate’s kilns and wind tunnels the place wooden for the guitar our bodies and necks situation for weeks or months relying on origin, sort and eventual use.
This array of apparatus and applied sciences introduced Taylor Guitars with a widely known manufacturing info problem: siloed info techniques.
“We had totally different controllers for various machines and HMIs with totally different interfaces on them,” Robertson defined throughout his presentation at Inductive Automation’s annual consumer convention. For instance, the HVAC employees managed environmental controls whereas leaning on IT to supply the infrastructure, making a patchwork of disconnected techniques that made it tough to get a transparent image of manufacturing from an operations degree.
This fragmentation induced friction. Disagreements about how issues really labored have been widespread as a result of there was no central supply of fact. If somebody wished to know the temperature in a selected constructing or verify pump settings on the spray robotic cell they have been in control of, they’d need to navigate by a number of techniques with totally different interfaces.
Discovering Ignition by taking recommendation from an area water district and brewery
Robertson’s path to Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform got here by an sudden supply. “There was a case examine with the Helix Water District, our water district, and I noticed they used lots of the similar controls we did,” he recalled. So, when Robertson started evaluating management software program distributors to streamline Taylor’s operations, he spoke with the water district and so they gave him easy recommendation: “Do not simply purchase Ignition. Begin utilizing it. Do not take a look at anything. Simply go, belief us, we have gone down that path.”
