The automated contextualization and OEE software for manufacturers: Raven

Raven’s technology is rooted in a deep understanding of what it takes to drive improvement in manufacturing. Raven’s smart assistants empower operators to easily tag downtime reasons without being a disruption to their work. Raven only prompts questions when machines don’t have the answers. With the touch of a button, operators capture important human context often missed when using manual processes or other digital platforms. Collecting downtime reasons and operator input brings purpose to the frontline’s day-to-day and accelerates continuous improvement plant-wide. Raven integrates with your machines and tech stack to automatically label downtime, meaning less time and effort from your frontline and operations teams. In just a few days, you can start identifying systemic and real-time inefficiencies across your lines to drive sustainable improvements across your discrete manufacturing plants.

Raven combines data from machines and operator input in real-time to provide a clear overview of OEE and discrete production losses — with context for everything that’s happening on your lines, 100% of the time. Raven’s discrete manufacturing software creates an event timeline that includes contextualized time segments, allowing you to visualize how machines and people spend their time — down to the second. Raven’s discrete manufacturing software solution enables your entire shop floor and tech stack to perform stronger by providing more meaningful, actionable data insights to your frontline and factory management teams — for increased efficiency, parts produced and win.

Achieve Operational Excellence in Manufacturing

Operational excellence requires continuous change. With smarter improvements, manufacturers can hit targets and reach higher goals by unlocking productivity. According to McKinsey, operational excellence is “the thoughtful application of new technologies and capabilities that drives productivity throughout an organization and across the entire value chain. From product development and procurement; to manufacturing and the supply chain; and to service operations to capital excellence. Like all of your other goals and objectives, achieving operational excellence in manufacturing can have ups and downs. One of the biggest challenges? Change management. To manage operational challenges across manufacturing plants, it’s essential to use proven frameworks with a team-driven approach.

Operational excellence in manufacturing is the point at which each and every employee in your factory can see the flow of value to your customer, and fix that flow before it breaks down. From a process perspective, lean manufacturing and Six Sigma are included here. When manufacturing excellence systems are put in place to support operators, supervisors, and their teams, it sets them up for success. Manufacturers can efficiently hit targets and celebrate their wins. But, sometimes it’s a long and tricky process. The OpEx Annual survey noted that resistance to change is the most common challenge industry leaders come across at their company (21% of respondents). This result isn’t new. Every year since 2017, resistance to change has been the top challenge to achieving operational excellence in manufacturing. But, when quality improvements and a performance-driven mindset are used with your manufacturing excellence systems, then change is better managed across factories.

Include the Frontline in Quality Design

Quality design and planning includes any new or existing methods, processes or procedures. Whenever new designs and production flow are tested in your plant, it’s important to include your frontline operators on your performance audit.  Using an easy-to-use downtime tagging interface, like Raven, allows operators to provide meaningful context on what’s happening on their lines. This real-time visibility into new and existing production processes helps to identify bottlenecks and slowdowns. A frontline-friendly system engages operators, involves them and their ideas throughout the continuous improvement process and drives a collaborative environment where both operators and supervisors can identify where design modifications are needed. With the best design, the best product can be produced. 

Monitor Quality Control on the Shop Floor

Having effective quality control measures that shop floor workers understand and use, helps ensure production is constantly monitored. Quality control measures can include spreadsheets, whiteboards, team stand-ups, technology, or classic pen and paper to track data and notes. When operators are enabled to provide meaningful context to what’s happening on a specific process, then inconsistencies that impact quality can be flagged to notify supervisors in real-time. To make control measures even easier (and more efficient), Industry 4.0 solutions have data reports and trends analytics that instantly notifies supervisors about issues on the lines and guides them to take immediate action. This enables the frontline teams to work smarter, resolve the root cause of issues to reduce downtime and ultimately increase their capacity to hit production targets. 

The quality standards of a product can also be improved with ongoing changes to the processes with help from the frontline.

Practice Continuous Improvement across Your Organization

Continuous improvement is a process of discovery and change for increased production efficiency and ongoing growth and development for your factory’s workforce. To fuel continuous improvement, the engineering and management teams need to have two-way, data-informed conversations with their frontline so they’re on the same page. In addition, when the frontline is included in those continuous improvement strategies, they’ve added more meaning to their day-to-day responsibilities. The result? An engaged frontline that has the confidence to help uncover productivity improvements and see the value of their hard work. Operational excellence in production processes is most successful when quality principles focus on design, control and continuous improvement. But, an effective implementation strategy is also needed to help manufacturers reach their biggest business goals.

Martin Cloake, CEO

“With Raven’s Automated Contextualization Technology (ACT), artificial intelligence uses historic and real-time data from people and machines to provide you a meaningful timeline of events — accounting for 100% of production time and OEE losses.”