About Swift Components
Swift Components is a manufacturer of acoustical and thermal attenuation components, specifically for Tier 1 Automotive OEM Suppliers. They have strategic partnerships with Tier 1 Suppliers with a requirement to support the development of new products, contract manufacturing of production components, and other assembly or prototype services. Their key customers are Honda, Toyota, and clients in the off-road vehicle / RV market.
The Challenge
In 2020, Swift signed on a business deal with Honda. This prompted them to follow a new set of quality standard requirements, upgrading from the ISO to IATF. This transition would require the ability to analyze data at a more detailed level.
However, their existing system was not sufficient enough to fit the requirements. Swift was using pen and paper at the time for their production logs, which meant they would have to hire someone full-time to sit down and babysit their Excel sheets all day.
Swift needed a system that could simplify data collection and display data in a digestible format. There were four types of data Swift needed to collect:
- Heat Settings — process parameters for the hydraulic presses, and other kinds of water jets.
- Productivity — who did what and when, which is necessary for tracing the root causes of production issues.
- Amount of scrap — not only as a requirement made by Honda, but to also understand which production line had higher incidences of certain defects. This allowed them to figure out whether the issue was with raw materials or training.
- Lot Traceability - tracking raw material batches related to specific production runs
The Solution
Swift originally started with a different data collection system where they made custom forms and fields to automatically populate CSV files. However, when their operations team got to turning that data into a dashboard, they realized that they would have to employ someone full time to do that work. They then decided to start looking for a better solution to interpret that data. That’s when they came across Tulip, which provided both the data collection and data analytics all in one place.
Heat Settings
Being able to easily track all details of their production has allowed Swift to log and chart highly specific measurements on their thermocouple and hydraulic presses. And with that dashboard, the maintenance department can identify if there are any issues or fluctuations with the heater, identify the lifespan of a thermocouple, or spot any device or tool that may be running off-spec.
Productivity
Using Tulip, the production supervisor will log how many parts need to be made per line that day. Once shop floor workers get to their station, their interface will automatically pull what their target is for the day, and prompt them to enter who’s at the station, how many parts they will be making, and all their start-up settings. And if the entered information is outside of the target parameters, supervisors will need to approve. At the end of each shift, workers will see a production statistics sheet which they will either verify or ask for manual adjustments, which then also gets signed off by their supervisor.
At the end of the day, once everybody has posted their finished runs in the app, supervisors can go through and see all the results from that day’s production logs in one place. It serves as a snapshot of that day’s performance and as audit data for figuring out during what shift, and which line the quality issues are repeated.
Scrap
Workers use a bin building app to easily log when they are finished with a bin. This simple app not only tracks how many parts are being made per shift, but specifically the number of total scraps per shift, the types of scraps, and by what percentage for each type. They then share the dashboard with their clients.
You have to think about how the data would be useful because it's not enough to just record it. You have to put it somewhere where you can build the dashboard off of it easily.
Kristen Danson, Managing Partner
The Results
Swift succeeded in satisfying the requirements of their new quality management system — all without having to restructure their operations team. Implementing this system with Tulip greatly reduced the burden of maintaining their data requirement and has given the operations team better control over their data.
As an added benefit with Tulip, Swift can now track their downtime more efficiently by cause, identify the root causes of material defects, and build production run summaries based on real-time data. These metrics have allowed Swift to adjust appropriate goals based on the status of its operations on a day-to-day basis.
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