Quality control for one piece flow production

Hi, welcome to IFS!

ahh, yes I feel you pain. I recognize the issues from when I was a production engineer, but now I am developing these systems instead. The concept of reporting on orders have traditionally not been adjusting well to the more and more prevalent one-piece flow.

Just to get the terminology straight here; a “Quality plan” in your case I guess is referring to a control plan that is connected to the creation of multiple analysis on several operations on each order. There is nothing stopping you from reporting on several different analyses connected to the same order, if the analyses have been created (the right triggers have been used). In the example in the image, I have an analysis with three data points on operation number 10 on an order of 50 pieces.

I guess in your case you could also have multiple analysis numbers connected to other operations on the same order but either way you can report on these in a one-piece flow without any problem. You might have issues closing some operations if not all samples have been reported when you try to close, depending on how you set up the control plan. However, opening and closing the all the windows is not efficient in a one-piece flow as you say.

Here is how I go about solving this problem: I would build a custom web-dashboard using a free tool like NodeRed. In this dashboard I would have the quality reporting options required for the one-piece flow. I would use the APIs in the ShopFloorConnector to get the required operation/analysis information and then use the report analysis result API to report. The quality reporting of each piece could then be handled using the form, you built, in the NodeRed dashboard. 

To prove my point, I tested to report the results in data point 1, 2, 3, in the first image, for just one piece with the click of one button (using a Postman script). This could be set up to do the same thing across several analysis numbers connected to other operation numbers on the same order.

These APIs are available in IFS cloud from 22R2 and onward as a part of the MES developments.

Now, if you instead want to complete an entire analysis for each piece, then you must use one order per piece you produce. This will allow you to run all the control logic that is connected to the completion of an analysis but the trade off is that you get a lot more orders. This is a hard pill to swallow but one-piece flow is coupled with one-piece reporting. The handling and reporting of these orders can also be mitigated using the MES APIs and custom developed interface in a tool like NodeRed.  

This might be a to intricate reply and not what you’re looking for, but this is my take from how I have interpreted the issue.

Hi,

I am glad my answer was well received. :)

BPA workflows could help to simplify the affected processes. However if there are deviations the workflows might end up becoming just an additional administrative workload. Depending on how complex processes you want to automate and what kind of relationships you have between the orders this could be hard to setup and maintain.

An other potential solution

When you mentioned BPA, I had an idea. I am not super familiar with the BPA workflows but there might be a way to have the cake and eat it here. In the control plan triggers you have the option to set a manual trigger that can be used in a custom event. This event could in theory trigger the generation of a number of analyses that match the quantities on order when order is started. This analysis number generation would be done using a BPA workflow (this should be tested though since I am not sure if this works). Each control plan line would have a fixed sample size set to one. Then you could report in a one-piece flow.

You would still have the problem of having to move from screen to screen when you have multiple analysis numbers on one piece but that I addressed in my previous reply regarding an external dashboard tool. The downside of this solution is that is a customization (though a small one), but the positive part is that you could utilize the quality logic within IFS, keep the order sizes big but produce and report quality in a one-piece flow.

I might have overlooked something here, but it could be a plausible solution worth investigating. 

Thank you very much for your answers.

I have forwarded to our partner who will test the propositions.