What can Weld Production Monitoring Provide Insight to?

SERIES: Where does Weld Production Monitoring Fit into Recovery and Reinvention?

PART 4:

What Areas Weld Production Monitoring can Provide Insight To?

Originally shared in WELD Magazine's Fall 2020 Edition, IRCO Automation and IRCOpulse explore Weld Production Monitoring in a time when many companies are and were faced with a period of recovery and reinvention. Click the links below to jump to the other parts of this series.

Posts in this series:

• PART 1: Introduction 
• PART 2: What does true production monitoring look like in the world of Industry 4.0? 
• PART 3: What does production monitoring mean for Welding Automation? 
• PART 4: Areas Weld Production monitoring can provide insight to 
• PART 5: What to consider when choosing a production monitoring system (Coming May 25)
  

What can Weld Production Monitoring Provide Insight to?

There's more to manufacturing than just seeing the physical end product - especially with welding. Your operations team, your financial team, your weld engineering team all have different questions and concerns. Some of the questions you're being might sound like some of the ones on this list below: 

• How do I know our equipment is performing at its highest level?
• What is holding us back from improving our weld quality?
• Why are we failing to meet our production quotas?
• Where are there bottlenecks?
• What are our true costs?
• How can we produce less scrap?
• Are our operators meeting our daily arc-on goals? If not, why?
• Am I able to determine if our faults, errors, or rework are due to operator error or mechanical failure? And how do we fix them?
• How much time do our machines lay idle between shift changes, AMs and PMs, or breakdowns?
• Is the performance of our automated welding system in sync with upstream and downstream equipment?
• Are there new challenges in our manufacturing process? Why?

A production monitoring system can help collect the data and provide you with the transparent proof to answers to these questions. 

Not all Production Monitoring Systems are created Equal

While some generic production monitoring systems provide clean visual metrics, these systems can fail to provide the whole picture a company needs. The data collected and displayed fails to bring together all the pieces of a process, leaving more questions than answers. Each company is unique - their KPIs, weld environments, and production steps vary. Because of this, production monitoring systems should be adaptable and explicitly programmed to pull and provide customized data that is most relevant.

Depending on a company’s KPIs, the IRCOpulse ™ Production Monitoring System, for example, can

provide insights into:

• Real-time weld parameters (deposition rate, voltage, current, wire feed rate, and weld travel speeds)
• Operational throughput (completed parts) in relation to production time
• Operational cost reductions through the identification of wasted time and materials
• The relationship between on-arc time (%) and idle or downtime
• Consumable usage rates
• Instantaneous fault tracking/alerts/identification
• When maintenance is required, or faults and alerts are triggered (including scheduled preventative maintenance alerts based on time and use)
• Knowing what’s going on at each stage information that speaks to both upstream and downstream processes (either)
• Inefficiencies – pinpointing where they are
• Optimization Potentials – what's going well and shouldn’t change?

Production Monitoring that addresses YOUR questions

Knowing that a standardized solution wouldn’t match the dynamic and varied needs of heavy industry and welding, the IRCOpulse ™ Production Monitoring System was developed by welding automation experts to offer clients customizable and meaningful metrics that together provide a true pulse on their production and manufacturing that can help lead to transparency, sustainability, and growth.

Coming Soon - Part 5: What to Consider when Choosing a Production Monitoring System (Coming May 25)

Contact Us & Related Content

For more information about IRCO Automation's automated welding solutions, visit the Welding Automation page on our website.  Connect with our team by sending us an email at: info@ircoautomation.com 

Looking to learn more? See the following Resources: 

• Hard vs Robotic welding automation - What's the difference?
• Welding Automation - Turn-key Solutions
• Welding Automation: Beam Welding
• Components of an Automated Welding System
• Robotic Welding
• More on Production monitoring