19/05/2021

1. Background - Describe current industry norms/practices to demonstrate an understanding of the issues facing that market segment today. Define market conditions and outline the customers position.

A Large American Healthcare Company ’s Medical Devices Production Facility in Woodlands, Singapore, was seeking out a solutions partner with expertise in both Life Sciences and Manufacturing floor connectivity solutions. They had engaged RoviSys after consulting with some of their machine vendors and several rounds of discussions with us. They discovered that RoviSys matched their requirements perfectly!

2. The challenge -Tell a story. What is the situation that needed to be solved? Summarize the challenges your client faced before turning to your organization and provide specific details. You can include history about the client or the relationship the company had with a competitor. Explain why earlier efforts failed to solve the problem(s) and then show how these problems threatened the customer's business. Provide timelines and historical details.

Client’s OEM machines are more than 20 years old and they had tons of issues with these machine diagnostics but were too expensive to be replaced. Whenever is a failure/error occur, there are no telltale signs nor diagnostics. Physical checks on the I/O cards are always required and they had to resort to trial-and-error card replacements for fault detection. These extensive troubleshooting resulted in more downtime and OEE dwindled to ~ 85%. Due to the age of the machines, original machine vendor also could not support them anymore. They realized that this was not sustainable and embarked on a journey of upgrading their production to increase their throughput.

3. Solution - Describe the steps you took to resolve the issue. Describe the resources and expertise that RoviSys brought to the project. Give a detailed outline of your approach and why it was chosen. What made it unique and how did it help?

Rovisys did a detail study of the machines, system and production and proposed an upgrade of their PLC5 to Controllogix system. We went on to provide advisory on the new drives that are compatible and had better functionality to improve the cycle times. Based on our research and application knowhow, we determined that the Kollmorgen AKD Servo Drives and Lexium SD3 Stepper Motor Drives would reduce jerk and provide smoother response, which improves their line stability. Rovisys were able to tune the drives to optimal parameters based on our domain and operational experiences. We also went on to implementation of visualization of the remote IO fault detection and save them the trouble of physically going to the machine to troubleshoot.

4. The results - Start with a list of tangible benefits. This section is the opportunity to address results the solution achieved. Use statistics and client quotes to back up your claims. How did you improve the client’s business?

With these new improvements, they now troubleshoot faster and greatly reduced turnaround times. This resulted in OEE improving to 92%, which translates to an increased output. Original cycle time was 4secs per unit and it has now improved to 3.8secs per unit. Client has since gotten back their investment on the upgrade of the machine, in a matter of 6months after the project. Client had subsequently came back to Rovisys for other machines upgrades. Twin cam#1 to Twin cam#4 has been successfully upgraded. Twin cam#5 is on the way.

Last but not least, they are now speaking with Rovisys to upgrade machines for another product line too!