AISIN North Carolina (formerly AW North Carolina) is a leading manufacturer of automatic transmissions and their components.
Promoting a strong, team-based, multi-cultural environment, AISIN North Carolina produces fully assembled automatic transmissions as well as components, including torque converters, oil pumps, clutch assemblies and stamped parts.
The problem
AISIN North Carolina was using inadequate and time-consuming paper documents and spreadsheets for its shift handovers and logging of human-entered information. Most data collection was recorded on paper, with some having to be transferred into spreadsheets. This resulted in unnecessary double effort in entering data after the point of entry. It was also a nightmare to look for archived information, due to having to search through a warehouse of the stored paper documents. It would often take days or weeks to find that information, and the organization was also printing six boxes of paper a day.
The accuracy of written information was also inconsistent, and it was often difficult to distinguish between letters and numbers. This made it very time-consuming to digitize some information. As AISIN North Carolina's procedures were not fully digital, it was difficult to audit if supervisors were doing approvals at the correct times during the shift or to know exactly what happened during the previous shift.
AISIN North Carolina uses an external data historian to collect real-time data, but didn't have a digital link between non-automated human procedures and real-time data. However, they had no efficient digital link between their non-automated human procedures and real-time data. Personnel could not easily view the real-time data that was relevant to the procedures recorded on paper forms.
How Tempo Operations Management solved the problem
To solve its paper and spreadsheet efficiency problems, AISIN North Carolina augmented its production Human Machine Interface (HMI) with Tempo Operations Management. The Tempo Operations Logbook (formerly j5 Operations Logbook) enables the clear recording and management of manual and automated events across shifts. These events are consistently and efficiently visible on a web browser, which is easily trackable and searchable, which was not possible before on paper. All events are recorded at the point of entry, with no double entry into spreadsheets required.
Tempo Shift Handover (formerly j5 Shift Handover) allows operators, supervisors and plant leadership to thoroughly review relevant data, events and alarms at shift handover, ensuring a consistent, visible and accountable process. Important information from the previous shift is now readily available.
Tempo Work Instructions (formerly j5 Work Instructions) enables the team at AISIN North Carolina to plan, record, manage and view daily instructions consistently and efficiently. Completed tasks are summarized in Tempo Shift Handover and the team is notified instantly.
Tempo Standing Orders (formerly j5 Standing Orders) enable the controlled dissemination and acknowledgment of critical communications across operations teams. As this is now digital, there is instant visibility on who and who has yet to acknowledge these critical communications.
Tempo Operations Management ensures that the real-time events retrieved from Tempo Operations Management connectors are properly recorded, and the correct human workflows are put in place. This is impossible with paper.
Tempo Operator Rounds and Routine Duties (formerly j5 Operator Rounds and Routine Duties) allow for the recording of plant data outside the control room. This allows production line workers to continuously record digital data, which is automatically fed into the next shift handover report. Therefore, information recorded using Tempo Operations Management is readily available for analysis and reports. Anomalies are also highlighted at the point of entry, enabling quicker rectification or escalation.
Tempo Operations Management allows for consistent layouts, fields, categorization, hierarchies, reports and clean data. This enables users to easily search for and understand important information, improving day-to-day performance and safety at the plant. For example, a template used in Tempo Shift Handover allows the shift crew to follow a strict approval workflow to fully complete the shift handover process effectively.
AISIN North Carolina uses Tempo Operations Management dashboards, reports and views to effectively visualize data from the solutions. The Tempo Operations Management connectors for external applications connect relevant data from historian databases. Tempo Operations Management also allows AISIN North Carolina to modify its templates without assistance.
Benefits of Tempo Operations Management
Tempo Operations Management saved AISIN North Carolina up to an hour and a half daily. These hours were previously spent creating manual shift handover reports on paper and spreadsheets. This offline data entry was incredibly inefficient, and now that all the data is being recorded at the point of entry online, there is no double work required during or at the end of a shift.
AISIN North Carolina has digitally transformed a 20-year-old process. Experienced operators had used paper for two decades and there was initial skepticism to change. However, it soon became clear that Tempo Operations Management would improve their day-to-day process performance, and they are now very happy with the solution. This has also allowed a better knowledge transfer to inexperienced colleagues who are digital natives.
There is now a clear centralized platform for operations management procedures with consistent formatting, structure, workflows and a singular point of entry. Paper has been eliminated, and everything is available on one connected platform. This has enabled an efficient digital link between external historian databases and the operations management Human-Machine Interface (HMI). It enables the powerful combination of human procedures with real-time data. Finding information in the paper archive used to take days or weeks. Now it is an almost instant process using the filters and search engine inside Tempo Operations Management. This has drastically improved the efficiency of data collection and retrieval.
