Winning the Intralogistics Game: Avoid Automation Overload

Connecting Systems, Equipment, Processes and People

In modern manufacturing and distribution, intralogistics acts as a backbone, allowing for free and fluid movement of materials. As the complexity of facilities increases by adding new technology systems, equipment, processes, and people, this backbone can bend or break under the stress. What seems like efficiency and productivity tools, like adding AGV and AMR fleets, can actually have the opposite effect, leading to bottlenecks, inefficiencies, communication breakdowns, and even safety issues.

Key Drivers and Enablers for Plant Floor Success

Integrating the Silos

Organizations often rely on Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, but too often they stand as silos, independent from each other. While these are powerful systems in isolation, the real value is found when the systems communicate.

An MES and ERP connection, for instance, ensures that production schedules match inventory levels. Further integration with WMS allows for order picking and shipping accuracy. When all systems are communicating with each other, plant managers can make informed decisions more quickly that results in fewer mistakes and higher throughput.

Machine to Machine Integration: Efficiency on Autopilot

In intralogistics, an increasing number of machines like Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), conveyor systems and other material handling equipment dominate the plant floor. These machines again provide valuable services, but should work together, with seamless handoffs, to ensure the most efficient flow of materials. This is especially true when anomalies in production change what needs to get moved, and when and how it moves.

AGVs or AMRs, for instance, may need to be rerouted as plant conditions change. A centralized, integrated system can manage the coordination in real-time ensuring productivity and decreasing operational costs.

System Integration: Workflow Optimization

Complex processes often include multiple steps that need to be coordinated across different departments or areas along the shop floor. Through process integration, plant managers can standardize how tasks are completed and ensure that the steps in each stage of material handling or production line up seamlessly with the next.

If a bottleneck happens on the production line, for instance, an end-to-end process can automatically reroute resources or adjust schedules to account for delays. Moreover, there is an opportunity to make such adjustments in proactive mode if material flow processes are integrated with demand forecasting—thus better preventing under-production or overstock. It minimizes lead times, allocates resources better and responds quickly to fluctuations in production demand.

Integration with people: upgrading communications and increasing the effectiveness of team collaboration.

Intralogistics may include the latest technology, but it’s people that can make or break a system. Technology and systems should enable people to make snap decisions and solve problems quickly. Digital tools allow operators, managers and engineers to collaborate more effectively, sharing information quickly so that issues can be addressed as they occur.

Typically, integration like this occurs in the form of HMIs (human machine interface), mobile apps, or dashboards which give employees real-time views of material flow, equipment status and health. When the right data is in the right hands at the right time, decisions can be made faster and more accurately.

The Holistic Approach of Integration

The plant floor should be a well-orchestrated ecosystem of integrated systems, equipment, processes and people. There are several advantages to this type of integration:

• Better visibility: Real-time data that is accessible across all platforms allows managers to see the full picture at each step of intralogistics and make more informed decisions.
• Increased Efficiency: Combined systems and equipment can adapt on the fly to plant conditions, preventing bottlenecks and reducing waste.
• Less Downtime: With processes and equipment connected, predictive maintenance can keep downtime associated with unexpected failures to a minimum and improve the utilization of plant machinery.
• Flexibility: The plant floor can accommodate changes in demand, customization of products or even unforeseen disruptions that make operations more agile and responsive.
• Improved Communication: Integration allows departments and teams to communicate effectively for better problem-solving and innovation.

Conclusion

Wanting to connect systems, equipment, processes, and people is easy. Actually making the connection is quite another. And as many intralogistics managers soon realize, making changes to an established ecosystem can cripple or even halt movement of materials without complex reintegration. It’s important to find systems that can oversee the complexity of intralogistics, and more importantly, the modifications of intralogistics.

It’s for this reason that Flexware spent considerable effort in developing a product called LIFT™. LIFT orchestrates the complexity of intralogistics and gives shop floor personnel the ability to add, or make changes, to established flows. It allows for new systems, equipment, and processes to be added, connected, and communicating with the larger ecosystem. And it does this in a point and click interface that doesn’t require costly programmers to make new connections.

Whether you use your own systems to manage the chaos of intralogistics, or use a system like LIFT, it’s important to understand the need. If the expert engineering teams at Flexware Innovation can help you think through this complexity, we’d be happy to learn about your needs and offer some guidance. Contact us today or learn more about LIFT here.